Guiding+Questions

The planning sub-committee decided as a group to go beyond the required tech plan for e-rate, and push into unchartered waters. We chose to create a long term plan that would identify strategic uses of technology to address a variety of areas in our district. To achieve this, we agreed that a set of common guiding questions would be discussed in each building. Interestingly, those not suprisingly, many of these questions are not at all about technology. The information we gather from these meetings will be captured and reviewed by our committee.


 * Below are the rough notes of the guiding questions we discussed. Please edit, revise, add, and delete as appropriate. Remember, no change is permanent here! We can always roll back to a previous version!**

(Setup) We want to talk with you about how you teach, what works, what you wish you could do, and the things that frustrate you or act as roadblocks to success.

(General Effectiveness) What types of activities and teaching approaches are most successful with your students? (e.g., multimedia or other activities that engage them, interactive discussion, use of hands-on manipulatives, etc.)

What are the approaches that best engage the students and result in succesful learning? (e.g., showing them thought-provoking material as a discussion starter, collaborative or small-team assignments, assignments that involve certain technology tools, etc.)

What do you wish you could do or achieve with your students, inside (or outside) the classroom, that would have a big positive impact on their learning? (e.g., interact with students in other cities or countries, get them to do more real work outside of the classroom, etc.)

What goals seem "just out of reach?" Why?

What frustrations do you have in your instructional day?

What roadblocks stand in the way of what you want to do?

If you could "fix" something about the dynamics in your classroom, or if you could achieve something new in the classroom, what would it be?

(Use of Technology) What technology do you use in your class? How do you use those tools?

What tools are most effective? Least effective? Why?

What technology or instructional tools would you recommend for your classroom? What would you be able to achieve, specifically, with those tools?

What would you want technology to help you with in your instructional tasks? (e.g., improve collaboration inside the class, or outside the class, or with other schools, or help to more strongly engage students in the work, etc.)