Action Plan

1. Identification and Summary of local issue:

The local issue that I have identified and am in the process of addressing is the use of E-learning (digital curriculum strategies) to enhance our traditional F2F courses at Northland High School. Currently there are two teachers, myself being one of them, that incorporate any sort of systematic E-learning (beyond Internet research and presentation software/hardware) into their classrooms at all. According to the research that I have done to date there are major advantages for student learning when using web-enhancement or blended learning in traditional classes, and the use of digital curriculum strategies is also becoming more pronounced at every level of education. My school district needs to be on the front edge of these educational phenomenons rather than the trailing because we are a small district and are always in search of new ways to draw students from the small surrounding communities to our school district. In short we need to be progressive in our educational tactics and aggressive in our methods to attract and keep students. It is my belief that the incorporation of digital curriculum strategies and the use of technological tools into our traditional classrooms and instruction will go far toward helping ISD 118 achieve those ends.

2. References

This issue has led me to find the following target audiences: teachers, students, parents/taxpayers, administrators and the school board. I have found the following resources that address how to sell the incorporation of E-learning to these target groups:

Teachers:

Romizowski, A. (2004) How’s the E-learning baby? Factors leading to success or failureof an educational technology innovation. Educational Technology, 44 (1), 5-27.

Students:

Crawford, D. L. (2006). Characteristics leading to student success: a study of online learning environments. Unpublished submitted to the faculty of the graduate school of Texas A&M University-Commerce in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of doctor of education.

Parents/taxpayers:

Naidu, S. Designing interaction for e-learning environments. In M. G. Moore and W. G.Anderson (Eds.), Handbook of Distance Education. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrance Earlbaum Associates, 2003.

Administrators:

Hall, J.L. (2003) “Assessing learning management systems”, [online], feature article for chief learning officer. January http://www.clomedia.com/content/templates/clo_feature.asp?articleid=91

School Board:

Department of Education, W. (2000). e-Learning: Putting a World-Class Education at the Fingertips of All Children. The National Educational Technology Plan. http://search.ebscohost.com

3. Action Plan

When creating a new plan of action one must consider cost. What I am proposing here is to incorporate the use of digital curriculum strategies into our traditional classes using OER’s or open education resources (free or mostly free). For example, in my classes I have begun to use both Wikispaces.com and Voicethread. Wikispaces can be totally free if you don’t mind a lack of security because after 30 days everything you create is open to public view unless you subscribe for $4.95 per month. This price is very small and could be used out of a teacher’s academic budget. The same is true of Voicethread. It can be totally free but a much safer and secure option is to use the library subscription that costs one dollar per user. In our high school and junior high this cost would cover every student and teacher in our building for $200.00, we would have our own secure site, and students too would have the ability to make 15 Voicethreads per year on the secure site. There has been talk as well of bringing D2L into our building because subscriptions are available to us through our relationship with IASC (Itasca Area School Consortium) and MINFINITY (an online school collaborative). We pay for these subscriptions already so our students can take online courses but a better option is to use another LMS/CMS (learning/content management system) that is available for free like Moodle. Moodle again can be totally free but there are a multitude of hosting options available that can ensure a seamless transition (security, bandwidth, trouble-shooting etc.) into a school for a much less prohibitive fee than D2L or Blackboard (which are highly expensive LMS/CMS’s). The short and long of it is this…we can spend some money that we can afford because it is already budgeted to ensure security or go totally free or be somewhere in between.

Teacher training, on the other hand, is a separate issue that may prove costly. Northland Community Schools has several vocal advocates in the teacher union. Developing online curriculum isn’t mentioned specifically in our contract. Adding to the duties of the teacher (by this I mean requiring all teachers to incorporate digital curriculum strategies into the framework of their traditional classrooms) without compensation I can guarantee will be an issue here. However, there are a number of teachers trained here in how to use Moodle (at least six) and we typically have a great budget for staff development. That means that this could be done in-house with money already allocated for staff development. Would the teachers be willing to do this here? I haven’t generated any

data at this time to give any answer but a guess, but I do know that our administration looks favorably at this proposal and is actively pursuing making this a reality.

What I am proposing here is basically the web-enhancement of all traditional F2F courses in the junior high and high school at Northland. There is no good reason to propose this unless academic rigor is guaranteed. There are some concrete reinforcements in place to make sure that rigor is at the core of instructional modifications. The first is that we are replacing current courses with purely online courses. That is to say that our traditional classrooms have gone through extensive measures to ensure rigor and incorporating digital curriculum strategies are adding to these measures not detracting from them. The second is that in terms of using discussion as an instructional strategy (an often overlooked and poorly done aspect of traditional classrooms) the potential for student learning and growth is without a ceiling. Asynchronous discussion allows one time for reflection and can be evaluated in much more concrete ways than classroom discussion. Finally, rigor can be guaranteed through a comprehensive, collaborative and monitored process of course creation/implementation. It is safe to assume we will not be perfect right away but the opportunities for collaboration are enormous compared to what is done now (we sit in our own little city state classrooms/kingdoms where nobody tells us what to do or how to do it).

If ISD 118 is to adopt my proposal, implement it, and evaluate its effectiveness then the opportunity for good and bad press exists. Schools in general do not do a good job with promoting themselves through the media. Lots and lots of cool things happen inside the walls of America’s schools everyday. What I am proposing, I believe, has the opportunity to give our schools many chances for good press. I think that people are starting to believe in the power of the Internet to provide their children with educational opportunities (look at the home-school boom). I think people want to know if they are getting anything for money they put out (like monthly fees for the Internet). I think people want to believe they are involved in their children’s education. I think people want to know what schools are doing to help their kids become successful.

My proposal addresses all of these concerns. We need to do a better job of using technology and digital curriculum here and if we do it will be a great benefit to our students. I think having 24/7 access to course materials is a benefit for students and parents (so that they can see what we’re doing if they want). 82% of the students in our school district have the World Wide Web available to them and more than 40% of that is high speed (these numbers grow each year according to our technology committee surveys). Using web access for educational reasons will most likely appeal greatly to parents. It’s our job to prepare kids for success in the 21st century learning environment. Finally, I’m not talking about raising costs for an entire school more than $1,000.00. This is an educational bargain if I’ve ever seen one.

I can see bad press happening too. We are a small rural district where people are still suspicious of the Internet. If something were to happen like it did in Pine River, MN where a young girl was murdered after going to meet someone she encountered on Craigslist.com, we most likely would have to remove all computers from our schools

(hyperbole). Some make an argument that people are losing their ability to communicate with others face to face and there may be some truth to that (however, I don’t think that social networking is going away anytime soon unless the sun explodes). Some of our students may not have access and the school should be responsible for providing that access to some degree. When I look at these they seem almost a little silly compared to the benefits our students will get from online education and the opportunities for good press that our district will get.

One of the biggest issues that this proposal faces is whether or not teachers will get compensated for online curriculum development. The answer here is yes and no. We are on a five-year curriculum cycle here at Northland High and we do get paid up to 100 hours for curriculum development in the first year of that cycle. 20 hours of pay are available for each year after that to review and revise curriculum changes. Our teachers also get a paid prep hour daily and we receive extensive opportunities for professional development if we seek it out (it is also scheduled on training days when an issue comes to the forefront like this one almost certainly will). So I these ways we will be compensated for online curriculum development. On the other hand, I am not including additional pay outside of what is already contracted to teachers. For lack of a better phrase, the fur is going to fly for those teachers here who are disinterested in the idea in general and who dislike or are unknowledgeable about technology. This is the biggest area of contention I have identified. It’s too bad really because we are talking about nothing less than familiarizing our students with the way that much of their future educations are going to be conducted. Teachers need to see the reality of that.

Will you execute any pre-post data to measure:

Academic Growth

Critical  and Creative thinking growth

Moving “at risk” students to the “general population column.”

ISD 118 Northland community schools has a lot of assessment resources in place. First off there is the data we collect each year from MCA and GRAD testing. This data in particular will give us some baseline data for each student in math, reading, writing, and science when they enter 9th grade. We also do fall and spring MAP testing produced by the NWEA. MAP testing in particular will be of the most benefit to us as an assessment tool because we do it twice per year with each student (except for seniors) in math and language arts.

Critical and creative thinking growth can also be assessed. The depth and degree of growth in thinking when creating comments should be visible over time. Online learning also presents opportunities for authentic assessment that often are not feasible in the classroom and these too can be evidence of critical and creative growth. As for a standardized measure I would not recommend another day lost to testing in our district.

The final measure of effectiveness for this program that can be measured is in helping at-risk kids succeed. This could be done with a variety of measures ranging from attendance improvement, assignments being completed on time, improvement in overall GPA, a decrease in behavior referrals, and passage of standardized testing measures put on by the state. We have a large population of at-risk students in our district as well being 58% free or reduced lunch, 25% Native American, mostly rural, and having a group home and alternative school in our district. A concrete system is in place to monitor these students to through our mentorship program (each teacher has about ten students in a reading, homeroom, mentorship period for 20 minutes per day).

4. Timeline for reporting out with empirical data?

With this proposal it is my intent to sell the ideas for the balance of fall semester to several members of my district including six key teachers, the technology administrator, the high school principal, and out superintendent. I have set up a schedule of meetings to show progress by using my classes as an example. It is my hope that the other six teachers will try to use the strategies and tools in their classes as a result of our professional learning circle.

Baseline data for students from fall semester should be available by January 25th. At this time it is my hope that a much more systematic and coordinated effort will be in place for many teachers to use our new tools. We can do comparison sets of data at the end of the school year. Map testing results will also be crucial here for empirical data. This data includes current student level from fall and will track their progress into the spring. This data is also several years in the making so we can see what the standard variable of student growth was for a particular kid and see if digital curriculum strategies implemented in the spring semester had any statistical significance toward educational growth.

By next year I am hopeful that the initiative has been made to include E-learning into all courses. We will have end of the year data from many sources and have three opportunities to view and report any impact that has been made on our students during the 2010-2011 school year.

We also partake in the Hope study (a study that surveys how hopeful a student is about their time spent in school). It will be interesting to see if incorporation of E-learning impacts those measures as well.

5. Technology Tools

Two new tools have been put in place at this time in my classes. The first is wikispaces.com which is Web 2.0 program. Students can author documents together on this site as well as use it for a discussion board. Programs like this, until a LMS/CMS program is in place are absolutely crucial to the development of digital curriculum strategies here at NHS. It’s free to use and is a powerful educational tool.

The next tool crucial to early development of digital curriculum strategies is Voicethread. This is a discussion board tool with many great features. Its interface is viewable and supports most kinds of media from video to audio recordings to MS documents of all kinds. The participants in each thread surround the interface and they have the option to make comments with their phone, webcam, text, photograph/image or audio recording. As a free tool this one is almost limitless in it applications and it also fits nicely into the free LMS Moodle.

6. Moving Forward

There are three things that are necessary for me to do to move toward completion of this project and proposal.

I must create a strategic plan for overcoming any bumps and obstacles that may come up during the early stages of this proposal (like the closing of wikispaces.com).

I must create an acceptable use document with the help of my students in order to guide all future users here at Northland High School.

I must create a four hour boot camp to put students through before they can participate in E-learning.

When I complete these tasks I’ll be ready to piece together the finalized proposal to present to my school board and this class sometime (hopefully) by the end of November or very beginning of December.