Midwest Summit Spring 2016

The primary purpose is to share our story of transitioning to a 1:1 environment and adding tech coaches in the same school year. These are two large scale initiatives. They are also initiatives that many schools have undertaken or are considering. One objective we have is that every attendee has take aways. Our story will include interaction with the audience gauging their place relative to our growth or their readiness for steps we have taken.
The audience will learn about the logistics of our 1:1 device distribution. We will share the plan and success we experienced in distributing just Chromebooks to 1,300 high school students. Included will be audience interaction (electronic poll) about the place a 1:1 pilot had or could have in their school. The audience will learn the benefits we saw in conducting our pilot.
The audience will be taken into the collaborative process that yielded our tech coaching team, model, and philosophy. During this portion of the presentations we will interact with the audience about writing a tech coach job description. Who fits the mold? What kind of people do we want? We will then discuss our experiences in putting together a tech coaching philosophy and model. The allocation of FTE toward the coaches is a major component of our philosophy. The take away here is essentially the importance, in our model, of tech coaches remaining in the classroom for some portion of their day. They are teacher coaches.
The final take away will involve a trip through the first year of tech coaching at Vernon Hills High School. Or philosophy was to engage teachers in reaching for the M and the R of the SAMR model. The focus of the tech coaches was on curriculum integration. We did not want to become workflow and tips/tricks experts. We truly wanted the model to focus on meaningful lesson enhancement using technology.
We do not think we are unique in this but it is not a common theme we hear from other tech coach models. We believe that our story will help some schools create a tech coaching model that is right for them.