The impact of PD in a 1:1 teaching environment<\/h1>\n

<\/a>A trio of middle grades educators from Mill River Union High School, in Clarendon, Vermont, presented the results of their semester-long action research project, examining what role professional development plays in increasing the amount of time technology is integrated into the classroom in a 1:1 environment.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Mary Colvin, Jen Little and Brendan Nerney<\/a> all teach 7th and 8th graders at Mill River Union High School, and as part of\u00a0attending 2015’s Middle Grades Institute, undertook an action research project to measure just what kind of an impact PD has on teaching practices in a 1:1 environment. They sought to answer the question, “How does professional development affect technology integration?” The school is in its third year of a 1:1 initiative with iPads.<\/p>\n

I was able to benefit when we were studying hurricanes, as we were able to decide as consumers to use an app called iHurricane. It gives you live feeds and updates, and you’re able to track hurricanes as they develop.<\/p>\n

Kids were emailing me all the time. “Did you see what happened with Olaf?”<\/p>\n

Yes, I did; please, stop emailing me these updates. \ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n

But they were into it.<\/p>\n

Mary Colvin:\u00a0<\/strong>Next steps and questions: All our faculty members in grades 7, 8 and 9 were the folks who participated in the LoTi survey so we have a baseline of where we were, and that’s an important piece. And that lends itself to PLPs for teachers. Teachers setting goals for “How can I improve this?”<\/p>\n

I feel like personally I’ve done this: yeah, in the past few years I’ve used a lot of technology, but I was really force-feeding it to my students. So I’ve set a goal of more beneficial, good use of tech in the classroom that makes sense and benefits both students and teachers.<\/p>\n

This year we’re also preparing for student PLPs. That’s one of our roles this year as well. Previously we had a PLP coordinator who got the ball rolling with PLPs for students and the teachers will be taking that over. We had felt like the PLPs weren’t all that personal when we had an outside person in our building two days a week, trying to make this happen with the kids. The kids were like, “PLP, whatever that is. They’re taking me out of P.E. and my study hall that day and I don’t even know who this person is, I don’t know why I’m there…”<\/p>\n

We felt this was another area of concern. We wanted to be with our kids, we wanted to be able to have those conversations with our kids. How are you learning this? Why are you learning this? What are those goals looking like? Not “I want an 80 in Math” but really good goals that have some teeth in them.<\/p>\n

And then of course, a proficiency-based system. I’m just going to leave it at that. We’re in a year of unknowns and there are a lot of questions around that.<\/p>\n

But all of us certainly are in agreement: we need to continue this. However that’s going to happen. If it means us trying to push it through, then that’s probably where we’re going to be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The impact of PD in a 1:1 teaching environment A trio of middle grades educators from Mill River Union High School, in Clarendon, Vermont, presented the results of their semester-long action research project, examining what role professional development plays in increasing the amount of time technology is integrated into the classroom in a 1:1 environment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17441,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[766],"tags":[14,201,394,241,580,407,492,61],"class_list":["post-8484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-action-research","tag-14","tag-edpuzzle","tag-google-classroom","tag-kahoot","tag-mgc","tag-middle-grades-institute-mgi","tag-mill-river-union-high-school","tag-nearpod"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8484"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8484\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17444,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8484\/revisions\/17444"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tiie.w3.uvm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}