C4Ta #4

IBeth Knittle is a K-12 Technology Integration Specialist for her district in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. In her blog, Supporting Complex Change, she talks about how hard it can be for some teachers to change their pedagogical practices. However, she says incorporating technology, PBL, and personalized instruction all together can easily be done by learning from their students. The best ways she says this can be done is by looking at Knoster's Model for Managing Complex Change. This model is based off of students and their reactions to and outcomes from different lessons.

In my comment on her blog, I told Ms. Knittle that I am going to have to store Knoster's Model away for use in my future classroom. I told her that I can definitely see how this model would help teachers understand what specifically went wrong when a lesson doesn't go as planned.

Ms. Knittle also wrote a blog titled, Thinking about Professional Development. In this blog, she talked about her views of Professional Development. She said she doesn't like how it's called "training" because that term implies that there are steps to implementing technology in the classroom. She says implementing is more of an art than a learned skill. She then gave three categories of teachers trying to use technology in the classroom: the Ready and Able, the Strong but Unsure, and the Overwhelmed.

In my response to her blog, I told her that based of her categories, I would consider myself in the Strong but Unsure category. This is because I feel like I know a good amount of tools to implement in the classroom (for someone who still has two more years to go in college, anyways). If I were to be put in a classroom to teach right now, I would be very hesitant about using certain tools in my classroom for fear of failure. Ms. Knittle said that the Professional Development seminars and those in the "Ready and Able" that really help people in this category become great educators. I really enjoyed this blog post!