Set a Goal and Set it Reasonably - One Small Step at a Time! Brian Ammons and Bob Stockton An Enrichment Specialist and a Technology Specialist at McDougle Middle School in Chapel Hill, NC

MT: What are your roles at McDougle Middle School?

Brian:  I am an Enrichment Specialist.  That means I do a variety of things.  I manage our school-wide enrichment program. I am also in charge of gifted services, and in doing that I do some pull out, but mostly I do collaborative work with teachers helping to develop and implement curriculum that meet the needs of all kids, with my particular energy going towards gifted kids.

Bob:  My job title is Technology Specialist, so I basically do two things: one is to help teachers think about ways to integrate technology into their curriculum and the other is to keep the networks up and running ... which takes up way too much of my time!

MT: How did you become a Technology Specialist?

Bob:  I taught four years of high school Social Studies and four years of middle school Social Studies before I took this job.  When I was teaching at Culbreth Middle School, in Chapel Hill, the district started a program called C.O.T.T. (Classrooms of Tomorrow, Today).  Basically, the idea behind C.O.T.T. was that rather than give everybody one computer, let’s put a bunch of computers in one classroom and see how that impacts the way he or she teaches.

So they started with one classroom in each school and I was part of the second cohort.  The best lesson I learned from that experience was to think about adding technology one unit at a time.  Our goal for the first year was to have one unit per year where you have integrated technology.  And the second year, add a second unit and so on.  I think that is a much saner way to think about it ... I think teachers are completely overwhelmed if they feel they have to use them all the time.

MT: What are some ways McDougle is integrating technology into the curriculum?

Brian:  We have a cluster program ... on Friday afternoons for an hour and a half, students are grouped across grade levels, by interest, and we do it for about ten weeks.  That becomes one of the places where kids who are really passionate about technology get to explore things further.  Right now we have a web page group, we had a web design group last year, and then Bob had a group particularly focused on the school web page.

Bob:  Stella is a piece of modeling software where kids can create various inputs and see what happens when they combine ... and they tried to replicate a virus spreading through a population.  We have had HyperStudio clusters for HyperStudio lovers that just love to play with multimedia. We have had Internet detective clusters where kids have learned search engine techniques and found good web sites that teachers asked them to look up.

Brian:  Yeah, so they were actually helping teachers.  One of the hardest things particularly about Internet usage is having to the time to sit down and look through all of the information.

MT: What are some of your experiences integrating Internet use into your instructional practice?

Brian:  I do a lot of Infinite Studies stuff or small group studies and there is a lot of Internet usage in that.  We try to figure out when we have a big question what do we need to do and what our search strategy is going to be for finding out information on this ... and then how to think critically about what we are finding.

I had this great experience where we were doing a problem-based activity based on the sinking of the Brent Spar, which is an oil platform on the North Sea.  [We were trying to decide] how it should be dealt with and how to get rid of it, because it was no longer useful. ... It was great because some of the resources we got were very much from Green Peace and other resources were very much from Shell Oil, so they both had a propaganda spin on them.  They had to figure out how to look at them and glean some real information from them.

Bob:  That really sums up two crucial parts of working with the web.  One is the search engine skills to find good stuff and the second part is once you get to a page how do you evaluate it?  That is a really hard skill!

MT: What types of technological resources are provided at McDougle?

Bob:  Because we are in a district that has so many resources we were able to create six Imac labs, so we have six rooms that have a dozen Imac’s in them.  The teachers have been forced to be more flexible in terms of sharing those spaces with their teammates ... pretty much everyone has at least four computers.

MT: How is technology best used in the classroom?

Bob:   I think the teachers who are using technology best in our school are using a center-based approach where everyone takes a turn, that may be in a group of two or four, but they are rotating through the computers and through other activities that don’t require the computer.

MT: Is there a grounding philosophy to technology integration?

Bob:  The philosophy would be two-fold; one part would be that you want the technology to be invisible.  We had the philosophy from the beginning that the kids wouldn’t go to a separate space to do computers, that the technology would just be one tool at their disposal in the classroom.  The other part would be that technology would be used in all curriculum areas at some point or another ... that it wasn’t going to be just science, it wasn’t going to be just core classes, that the elective classes would use it also.

In fact, one of the great consequences of putting these Imacs labs in, was that a woman who teaches French, all of a sudden had these twelve computers at her disposal.  Suddenly the kids are going to all these French web sites, learning the language, seeing what was going on in France.  It really galvanized her way of teaching and now she will not teach a unit without incorporating the Internet in some way.

MT: What is your advice to teachers just beginning to incorporate technology into the curriculum?

Brian:  My big thing would be to set a goal, that’s a measurable goal and set it reasonably.  So if it is going to be with one of my units, then I’m going to try to use technology in some really different, unique ways.  That’s a really appropriate goal for a first year teacher.  The other thing is to use the resources in the school... Find those folks who can help you.

Bob:  What I usually tell experienced teachers is to don’t expect to do it all the time.  Pick one unit a year, one unit a semester, and say ‘I’m going to add this other tool to what I’m already doing.’  Take a unit you are already comfortable with, don’t pick something you are struggling to cover, pick something that is a strength and say what Internet sites can I find to augment this, what other center can I add ... and take it from there.  Be willing to listen to the kids ... Be willing to let the kids participate in creating the resources for you.

MT: What are your future goals for technology integration?

Bob:  There are lots of teachers that are using the web as a resource, finding good sites to support this or that unit.  The next step is to become producers of content on the web and creating pages of favorite bookmarks so the kids can use them.

Brian:  I really think I see my role as more of a facilitator and a reminder to pull technology into what we are doing. ... My work is to encourage teachers to incorporate technology as a tool for differentiation.  Also trying to pull in community resources.  We have a professional web designer instructing and facilitating our web design cluster.  I think I fit into the technology picture by trying to find people in the community.

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