Guest Blog: Central Office Support for 2.0 Deployment

Guest blog by Derek McCoy, Director for Curriculum and Innovation, Montgomery County Schools

As part of our strategic planning for furthering the integration of 2.0 tools in our school culture, the Montgomery County Schools Curriculum Support Office has developed a multi-layered training and support model. Our objective is to train several different school personnel groups with specific skills, each distinct from one another. The groups would then be able to go back to schools and provide formal or informal training to teachers and students. Our hope is a purposeful design that would make a lasting impression on our school system.

2.0 Tools
The Curriculum Office began this process by identifying all the 2.0 tools we have received training on, individually and collectively, and tools we thought all school stakeholders would benefit learning the most about. This list was then put into broad categories; this helped with organizing and structuring the content. The categories and tools we came up with were:
• Blogging/Microblogging [Local school website features and Twitter]
• Graphics
• Collaboration
• Bookmarking
• Social Networking


[To help explain this process and the thinking behind it better, we will talk about the work we’ve done with Twitter for this past month]

Groups
We identified the groups we would train. These were essentially groups of personnel that members of the curriculum team met with regularly. Most were meetings that were previously set as district level meetings like K-12 Principals, Assistant Principals and Media Coordinators. Other groups were brought into this model because of their specific function with teachers and students. For example, Technology Specialists handle broad hardware concerns in the school and supervise specific lessons in the computer labs but they are regularly asked very specific questions about software and tools. Instructional Specialists were also brought in for their dedicated work sessions with teachers and overall involvement in curriculum programs. The groups were:
• Principals
• Assistant Principals
• Media Coordinators
• Instructional Coaches
• Technology Specialists [School level]

Training
Our training was tailored for each group. The Curriculum Office brainstormed skills we thought would be necessary and pertinent for each group based on the functions. For example, K-12 Principals had already been trained on Twitter; therefore, their training centered on learning a secondary tool, Tweetdeck, for multiple account management, information gathering and research; Instructional Coaches were trained on very specific instructional capabilities of Twitter; Assistant Principals were trained on tweeting from text and assisting teachers in setting up accounts.

This is part of the training matrix we developed:


This portion of the matrix doesn’t show the delegation of each skill to the Curriculum Support Staff. Staff members selected and specialized in a particular skill; this helped spread the expertise and work load so that no one or two persons was responsible for this delivery. Our Superintendent, Dr. Donna Peters, will even be co-leading some of the training for Collaboration Tools.

We shared this matrix with all groups to provide a big picture of our ambition. This matrix helped us ensure that our superordinate goal of 21st Century learning for all students was always in the forefront. We constantly communicate how these trainings can be shared students and staff as well as how each can impact learning.

Looking Back
As we’ve completed the first month, we’ve learned some lessons:
• Have each member set up accounts before the meetings – this saves time and doesn’t overburden internal and external servers, gives the members some familiarity with the tool and encourages adventurous members to be independent learners
• Plan for one-on-one follow ups – there are some people anxious to jump in that need an encouraging follow up
• Embrace Co-Teaching – One person at the main and one floating supporter
• Have everyone capable and ready to answer questions – multiple team members help not only with work load but availability.

Though there were some snags this first month, mostly with external server traffic, we feel that this has been a very effective model. Being able to show immediate and beneficial use of new tools helps early adopters grab the sure footing we want them to have and encourages our late bloomers to keep working toward the goal.