I am excited for the years ahead and the potential to harness the power of disruptive innovation for my school. Looking down the road, I hope I am in a leadership role being a change agent, and furthering the move towards using an ever increasing amount of technology in our schools. My desire is to help our students develop the skills to compete in a rapidly changing world that will continue to expand and push the boundaries that hold us at present. Because many of them lack the resources at home to interact with new technologies, our school must stand in the gap and provide them with extensive exposure to these innovations. To be successful in the world ahead, they must have a level of comfort with technology usage and develop skills that will allow them to interact with a great diversity of individuals.
I already see my school making great strides in integrating technology into their daily experiences. Each classroom is now equipped with promethean boards which allow the students to interact in ways unavailable before. This summer the school hosted a two day workshop training the teachers in using new avenues such as voice thread, movie maker, web 2.0 tools etc. Several schools in the district are equipped with not only computer labs, but also with 4 mobile labs. Administration clearly desires to bring our schools to the front in using technology, and I can see this continuing to evolve and grow.
My desire is to bring more mobile devices into the schools. At present my school only has computer labs, but no other means of providing access to all the students in the classroom. In reality, I think it will need to be iPads to give the greatest flexibility. If the students were equipped with them, they could create and share content in many ways. They could use them to create videos, work on wikis, and blogs. I imagine in the future, textbooks will be available to them online as well as other reading materials. I can see the students using these devices to collaborate with fellow students in different classrooms and grade levels. I would like to see them create content to show mastery of concepts and even use this content to help other struggling students. The possibilities are endless. They could have virtual pen pals in other states and countries. The knowledge they could gain from each other would be invaluable.
I think the biggest obstacle for my organization to become proactive is funding. Somehow we must find the way to get handheld devices into our students’ hands. I believe our administration is showing their acknowledgement that we must start doing things in new ways- ways that develop 21st century skills such as critical thinking and collaboration. I believe they want to lead from the edge and I believe we will find the way to do so. We will have to pull our resources and use some creative problem solving to accomplish this idea, but I believe we will make it happen for our students.
