Just as I hit “send” on an email containing my report for our schools’ ICT Integration Capacity Building Project I came across George Couros’ post. He writes passionately about using differentiated instruction when running PD in the area of technology integration. In the magic of pefect timing, my report had just become a rambling to the same effect. I realized as I sent off my report that the “Please add any comments or suggestions” section was longer than the report itself.

Our school board has a few strong visionaries in the area of ICT Integration. They created a project this year that brought together one lead from each secondary school (16 secondary schools). We each then were able to apply for a project in the area of $2000 for release time to integrate technology and build capacity within each school.

This project started well right from the beginning. The organizers recognized the individuality of each school right off the top. Many schools did projects similar to what George described in his post, but with smaller groups. Many used ABEL accounts and had a group of teachers working on using Moodle to support their classes. In almost all cases a group of teachers got together and supported each other in implementing the same technology.

At PSS we decided that there wasn’t one technology that worked for every teacher. Our goal was to build a culture where different teachers are all using different technologies. Whatever works for them. The building capacity part comes in the sharing and making sure we know what each other are doing. This creates multiple “masters” of different technologies within our building.

Below is a modified version of my report (boring budget taken out). Being able to use this budget to differentiate our experiences has created such a positive feeling around integrating technology in our school. Definitely a step in the right direction. Next year we will connect it more solidly to specific learning goals or achievement goals.

** In some browsers, the following SCRIBD document does not show properly. If not, you can access the word file here: http://www.jaccalder.com/ict-report.php

ICT Integration Capacity Building Project Report Modified http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf