Technology boot camp for administrators

A few weeks ago we decided to offer a technology ‘boot camp’ for administrators. CASTLE is working with the School Administrators of Iowa to make it happen. For those of you who are interested, here is some information on what we’re doing:

• Promotional flyer
• Boot camp wiki 
• The signs we have all around the room

We started yesterday. Unlike our Transitioning Schools into the 21st Century workshops, which focused on technology leadership issues, the purpose of the boot camp is solely to ramp up school leaders’ technological skills. Our emphasis is on providing a safe space for administrators to learn and empowering them to walk away from the workshop with the ability to actually do this stuff. We’re taking our time, answering lots of questions, and covering whatever we can in the time that we have. We had participants blogging within the first hour yesterday. They were pretty excited!

We’ve got a great bunch of school leaders in this first boot camp. If today goes as well as yesterday, we’ll do a few more next academic year.

Any feedback that you have on what we’re doing would be most welcome. Anyone out there doing something similar? If so, how’s it going?

Comments

[Chris]

1.

What a great idea! I confess that I'd like to steal and adapt this idea here in Ohio. Do you have plans for how long you will spend on each topic, or will that be dictated by the needs of the group? Please continue to post updates on your progress!

[Scott McLeod]

2.

Chris, after we're done today, I'll post in this comment area approximately how long we spent on each topic. Yes, do this! Goodness knows administrators need it!

[Scott Friedman]

3.

Great to hear what is happening! I too would like to borrow thoughts and content regarding the topics and adapt for our administrative team and possibly our state association in Washington. Thanks for all you do!

[Lin Jenkins]

4.

Chris--
I'm interested too (for my admins) and I live in Dayton. Let me know if you get this up & running-- maybe in connection with eTech Ohio?

[Scott McLeod]

5.

As promised, here are the approximate time allocations for what we did during our 1.5 days with a group of 30 Iowa administrators:

SESSION 1 (3 hours)
Intros / getting connected to wireless / creating climate of safety - 15 min
Setting up Google account - 15 min
Creating Blogger blog and posting 1st post - 25 min
BREAK (10 min)
Playing around with Blogger - 35 min
Getting started with Google Reader - 20 min
BREAK (10 min)
Continuing with Google Reader, RSS feeds, Technorati - 50 min
Completing end-of-session online evaluation form - 5 min

SESSION 2 (3 hours)
Blogger review - 15 min
Google Reader review - 5 min
Getting started with Google Docs - 35 min
BREAK (10 min)
Playing around with Google Docs - 30 min
Quick intro of iGoogle, Google Calendar - 5 min
Getting started with Twitter - 20 min
BREAK (10 min)
Playing around with Twitter, Twibes, Twitlet - 55 min

SESSION 3 (3 hours)
Apologizing for doing a terrible job with our Twitter stuff and confusing everyone - 5 min (gotta rethink how we did that!)
Playing around with bit.ly - 20 min
Playing around with Skype - 30 min
BREAK (10 min)
Playing around with Skype - 10 min
Uploading a picture from digital camera into Blogger post - 25 min
Introducing Flickr - 20 min
BREAK (10 min)
Demonstrating Animoto - 15 min
Playing around with Jing - 15 min
Demonstrating YouTube upload, QuickCapture - 15 min
Wrap-up - 5 min
Completing end-of-session online evaluation form - 5 min

That's as far as we got. It went well. Percent of participants that would like to return for a follow-up session to learn even more stuff = 100%. We learned some lessons for next time and I'll likely blog about those. Hope this helps!

[Melissa]

6.

What a fantastic idea! Would love to know how it turned out. I too am going to take your idea and suggest that we do this with our admin team in VA. What better way to advance your technology program by educating those that actually do the decision making.

[Marshall]

7.

Scott - I missed the opportunity (filled quicker than I expected) but have heard good comments from colleagues. Sounds like you have some interest around the state. Hope you don't wait too long before setting up another bootcamp with SAI. Good Luck.

[Jeff Schumacher]

8.

Need to construct safe space for our teachers to sandbox these tools - and provide co dituons within which they can construct learning experiences for srudents to use in a d out of the classroom.

[Jeff Schumacher]

9.

Forgive my spelling above as I am learning how to accurately use my smartphone (iPhone) for communicating;)! Fingers to large, patience a bit short.

[Bonnie]

10.

I wish we would do something like this at our school. What a great idea! Many times teachers are stonewalled when they propose new ideas in our district because the administrators do not understand the technology. They are afraid of it, so they quash creativity instead of fostering it.

[Jennifer McDaniel]

11.

Here at Region 16 Education Service Center in Amarilly, TX, I am running the 2nd year of what we call a Web 2.0 Boot Camp, though it's for teachers as opposed to administrators (though there are administrators involved). It actually covers the span of 6 months! We meet for Day 1 which is face-to-face where participants learn all there is to know about Web 2.0. It's a lot of information, but a very basic overview. The first follow up session (online) which runs during June & July focuses on getting participants to use some of these tools personally. There are different activies they have to complete a long the way. Follow-up #2 (again online) occurs during September & October where participants narrow their focus even more and find one Web 2.0 tool to use in the classroom. The boot camp concludes with a virtual showcase of what happened in their classroom. It's loads of fun and everyone learns so much from each other! Our wiki (which is where all the information is posted) is http://web20bootcamp.pbworks.com. I'm glad to know there are things like this to help administrators focus on their technology skills as well!