First TIID Training

These first two days of training were quite a eye opening adventure!  Although I already knew about the different personality types (Myer-Briggs inventory) it was a great reminder of each and how it affects both coaching and teaching. 

For the last ten years I have really focused on how it affects my students, but since I have quit teaching and moved into a mentoring position, my focus has needed to change!  Interestingly enough, I found day two to be the best when it came to learning how to use this information to promote more productive coaching relations, but not detailed enough.  I learned that our technology coach and I are complete opposites when it comes to work and that the biggest insult I or anyone else could ever do is to do his work for him.  Fortunately I was grouped with him quite a bit (due to being opposites) and learned quite a bit about him.  We also practiced dealing with coaching scenarios and were given some great tools to use when coaching other personality types. 

As for my role in this grant program I think my job can be identified as an instructional coach.  I find it interesting that many of the larger school districts don't have both the technology and instructional coach positions.  Instead in many cases a classroom teacher is fulfilling one of these positions as well as the project director.  Not to mention that we are very far ahead of other districts.  In some cases the schools haven't even placed the order for the equipment and in others the teachers have just received their pads to play with.  None of the students have the equipment yet!  Good to know. 

Finally, I know were concerned about ideas for lesson plans.  On October 12, 2011 teachers will get this information.  I think since we will have 7 people at this meeting it will be very important to divide up amongst the break out content sessions and then reconvene to share what we learned.  Because some schools have laptops and others have iPAD2s there will be sessions that include apps and web 2.0 tools.  In our case, I hope that our teachers will realize that they need to be using both of these tools rather than trying to replace web 2.0 tools with apps.  The free apps aren't there to do this and we would really be giving up on some great resources if we did this.

I am looking forward to learning more about this and have found that the teach.oetc.org/coach site has a link to lesson plan ideas from past grantees.  I will be exploring this site very soon.  We also did a lot of video creation and although I forgot to ask what program was used to by other groups to make theirs, I did learn of quite a few worth exploring.  Two I think we can use include Splice and Videolicious for iPAD2!  Check it out!