Technology Literacy Curriculum: Chicago Public Schools
Wednesday AM saw me at a session on a technology literacy curriculum. It wasn’t a session I particularly needed, but it seemed the most useful of the sessions in the 8:30-9:30am time. A panel from Chicago Public Schools (CPS) explained how they developed a technology literacy curriculum with Intel Education. Their curriculum is Web-based, low-bandwidth and cross platform, and allows for differentiation for various types of learners. And they assess students, once in October and once in May.
They also prepared a teacher and a parent guide to go along with the curriculum. The parent guide focuses on helping the child build research skills and information fluency at home. Parents can access the online tutorials to help their children or for the parents’ own use.
It sounds like CPS has a great program for helping teachers teach technology literacy. There are facilitation models for different situations: computer labs, classroom teaching, collaborative teaching and 1:1 laptop teaching. There are planning forms for individual projects. They also focus on differentiation and assessment of students, and the teachers are themselves assessed for literacy but not for integration (the area instruction technology coordinator has a rubric for assessing integration in the schools). Interestingly the reporting of each individual teacher’s progress is for that teacher alone. This makes sense and gives teachers the opportunity to improve. The administration only needs to know the percentages, I’d think: for example, 65% of our teachers have reached x level of proficiency.
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I wonder if any ISDs have a technology literacy or competency standard for newly-hired teachers? Or any type of screening assessment before an interview? I would be interested in any information that districts might care to share. I don’t think it can always be assumed that teachers have been schooled in delivery thru / with technology. This may also vary among disciplines.
July 2, 2008