August 6, 2014 at 4:28 p.m.
Hodag Tech Fest has teachers educating teachers to benefit district, students
Hodag Tech Fest has teachers educating teachers to benefit district, students
Close to 100 district staff members participated in the four-day event, the first of its kind in the district.
"What we wanted to do is create a professional development opportunity for teachers, but we had our teachers design it, so it's really by teachers, for teachers, and our teachers are the ones providing the sessions," said Heidi Catlin, the district's instructional technology coordinator.
"We had a group of teachers get together and we went to a conference in December and got the idea from another school district. I've always felt that we have such qualified teachers, such great teachers in our district that know so much and can share so much with each other that we wanted to try this out."
"We also wanted to develop more leadership within our district and I knew there were enough teachers in our district who could provide training for each other," she added.
While teachers are under increasing pressure to incorporate technology into their lessons, Catlin said one the goals of Hodag TechFest is to ensure the district's educators understand that technology cannot teach on its own.
"We also wanted to stress that the technology can't stand on its own, that this technology should be incorporated into all of our district initiatives, all of our content areas, and not just be a separate class or a separate part of the curriculum. It should really be a part of everything we do," Catlin said.
"What we did is we focused all of our sessions on current district initiatives. On Monday, it was teacher effectiveness and leadership. On Tuesday, it was communication and collaboration. Wednesday (was) blended learning and personalized learning, and Thursday (was) literacy, but all kinds of literacy - digital literacy, math literacy, reading, all different types of literacy. With those umbrellas, we came up with sessions on how technology can be used to support all of those initiatives."
So many sessions were taught over the four days that no teacher could attend each and every session. That was fine with Catlin, as she said the goal is for teachers to finish the week with a few new tools to incorporate into their classrooms during this coming school year before focusing on additional skills next year.
"I told the group I want them to move forward and try something new that they haven't tried before - to get out of their comfort zone," Catlin said.
"We're going to leave here this week with so many new tools, so many new resources and strategies, that they're not going to be able to do it all, but they can find one or two that really can support their goals and objectives in the classroom next year and get really comfortable with them - to focus on those tools within our district initiatives to really help our students."
While some districts may outsource an event like this, bringing in tech experts or consulting firms to teach the sessions, Catlin said having district employees teach other district employees was the better option because only they know what's going on within SDR.
"We have teachers who are in the classrooms everyday using these tools and using these strategies, and I think that builds leadership and we want to encourage our staff to share that with each other," Catlin said. "There's a quote that says, 'You don't need to be in a leadership position to be a leader,' and we really wanted to encourage our teachers to fill those roles. I think it's critical to encourage our own staff to take on these leadership positions and help teach each other because whenever you're teaching somebody, you always learn something yourself and that makes you a stronger educator."
"Our teachers are in our classrooms and they're all dealing with the same initiatives. Sometimes, when you bring people in, they don't understand the initiatives that we're working on. Our teachers know exactly what everyone's dealing with, so it makes sense to have them run these sessions," she added.
As an example, Northwoods Community Secondary School advisor Neil Rumney taught a session on blogging that he hopes will help increase efficiency in communication between teachers, students, parents and the community as a whole.
"I taught how to use Google's blogger site and how it works within the classroom," Rumney said. "For us, it's more about communication. You can use blogging to communicate with parents, with the public about what you're doing in your classroom or what the school's doing to help keep everyone informed."
Eighth grade math teacher Judy May participated in a session on YouTube embedding that will help her greatly this year.
May said she chose to participate in the sessions because she's starting what's called a flipped teaching classroom this coming school year and wants to make sure she has all the tools and skills she needs to ensure the new teaching style will benefit her students.
"I've spent the last year and a half doing some background research and there were just a few pieces that I was missing so I signed up to get it all ready," Catlin said. "This summer I spent time creating videos that I put on my YouTube channel that the students ... watch ahead of time to take notes - they can pause the video and everything to get nice, meticulous notes - where in the classroom you have to spend time getting everyone caught up with their notes so there's a lot of time that's wasted."
"If you assign it as out-of-class work, they can do it in study hall or at home or whenever, so when they come to class, we can take care of any questions they might have, go over sample problems I've given them and really get into the meat of the lesson," she added.
Both teachers said the sessions they attended and taught were incredibly helpful for preparing for the school year. Both educaters also said they hope Hodag Tech Fest becomes an annual exercise. Catlin hopes it will as well. She also said she hopes to expand it.
"We hope to (make the fest a yearly event). It's been successful. This year, we just opened it up to our district staff and the parochial schools in our town because those students become our students as they feed into the high school," Catlin said. "Because it's our first year, we wanted to make sure we could do this, but we've actually had several requests from teachers outside of the district asking if they could participate ... so we will evaluate that and see if we can expand it next year."
Rumney said he thinks including other districts will help everyone learn from each other and increase the effectiveness of all area teachers.
"Teachers tend to teach in silos where they have these great ideas, but they never spread them, and then we go and spend money to attend other conferences when we have a lot of knowledge right here within our buildings. That's the good thing about this, we're learning from each other. You might not think you're an expert, but you really are," he said. "I hope this is a yearly thing and what I hope they do next year and in future years is open it up to other districts in the area - open it up to Three Lakes, to Sugar Camp, to Eagle River, to Tomahawk - so we can bring in other experts that might have other things to share so we can help each other help our students."
May said the event is needed for teachers to keep up with ever-evolving technology.
"I think of myself as being tech-savvy but there are so many new programs that come out - things are always changing," May said. "Everything's always updating. There are always new things to learn about and know about, and we have to keep up with that for our students and for ourselves."
Marcus Nesemann may be reached at [email protected].
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