New Tech Network

In many schools, project-based learning happens in isolated cases: in certain teachers’ classrooms here and there, or in the contexts of specific subjects. But for students to benefit from project-based learning, ideally it’s part of a school’s infrastructure — a way to approach learning holistically.

For one quickly growing network of schools, project-based learning is the crux of the entire ecosystem. New Tech Network, which was founded 15 years ago, is taking its school-wide project-based model to national scale. The organization, which offers a paid program for schools to use its model, began with a flagship school in Napa and has grown to 120 schools in 18 states, most of which are public schools.

The network has not only grown in size, but also in notoriety. President Obama visited Manor New Tech High School in Texas last week, as part of an effort to promote an education agenda focused on producing graduates that can compete in today’s global economy.

The nod from the president comes at a time when New Tech is attempting to position itself as a successful model to follow. But rather than relying on test scores and such quantifiable numbers to prove its value, New Tech’s own 2013 annual report frames success by focusing on deeper learning that can’t be measured by standardized test scores and their college readiness. Yet it’s that lack of emphasis on test scores, an all-consuming worry for many districts, that makes it more difficult for the organization to pin point numbers to tell its story.

Here are a few of the statistics New Tech has gathered from their schools: students graduate at a rate six percent higher than the national average and enroll in college nine percent more than the average. They also persist in four-year universities at a 17 percent higher rate and 46 percent higher rate when it comes to two year colleges. Perhaps most importantly, they claim that students’ higher order thinking skills between freshmen and senior years grow 75 percent more than a comparison group that did not attend a New Tech high school.

New Tech calls itself a school development organization and is a non-profit subsidiary of KnowledgeWorks, another non-profit that acts as a foundation, education policy advocate and on-the-ground work through mergers with groups like New Tech, Strive and EdWorks.

GRAPPLING WITH THE PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM

New Tech offers whole-school change to any school interested in contracting with them, including public schools. It has implemented the model in charter and private schools as well, but the majority of its clients are public schools. “From where we stand, public school districts are as capable of innovative schools as charter schools,” said Lydia Dobyns, president of New Tech Network. But as everyone in education knows, every school and every district has different needs, and the organization’s offerings are changed accordingly.

New Tech schools are entirely project-based and cross-disciplinary. Students take courses like Bio-literacy, which mesh subjects together, emphasizing that disciplines are not stand-alone endeavors. Technology is woven throughout the school day and at home seamlessly. Many New Tech schools have one-to-one programs and all schools in the network use a learning management system called Echo that tracks student progress, is open to teachers and students, and connects New Tech educators around the country.

New Tech Network

Assessments are designed to measure different kinds of learning outcomes. Mike Reed, principal of Columbus Signature Academy in Indiana, said that only 60 percent of assessment is based on content. The other 40 percent is based on what he called “school-wide learning outcomes,” things like written and oral proficiency, work ethic, presentation skills and the ability to give and take feedback. Students can see the project rubric and know where they need to improve their skills.

“Looking at school performance is really different from looking at student growth, which is really what we want to focus on,” Dobyns said. That’s why New Tech doesn’t promise to increase school test scores – it sees that as a separate question, and one that they’re not necessarily interested in.

The schools that have taken on this model don’t seem to mind that test scores aren’t the focus. “A big difference you’d see is student engagement,” Reed said. “Students are working on authentic projects and problems.” He gave an example of a cross curricular physics and environmental science class that studied the physics of power and electricity. “Our students learned those skills and then rewired houses that were destroyed in New Orleans’ 9th Ward. They’re going to remember that far longer than regurgitating a test or a lab.”

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

New Tech works with schools individually, offering professional development as the school gets started. “One of the things we’ve learned and changed is that every implementation is now a custom designed implementation plan,” Dobyns said.

New Tech sticks with a school for five years, spending the first year laying ground work, listening to what schools want and need and garnering teacher buy-in. They offer intensive trainings to help teachers retool skills to teach entirely-project based and cross-curricular classes. Each school is given a coach who visits throughout the school year, checks on lesson plans, suggests changes and helps troubleshoot problems. And New Tech focuses on nurturing the leadership capacity of principals so they can continue to innovate with teachers.

[RELATED READING: Are Teachers of Tomorrow Prepared to Use Innovative Tech?]

At Columbus Signature Academy, Reed and his staff discussed the professional culture they wanted to promote and decided they’d make decisions by consensus. “That changes everything in a school,” Reed said. Those affected by a decision get equal say in making it, and that includes students. For example, teachers are in charge of the master schedule because it affects them most, but students can weigh in about how changes affect them too.

If gaining consensus is important in New Tech Schools, so is transparency. Teachers share and vet lessons with colleagues at the beginning and end of every project to learn from successes and mistakes. Teachers aren’t penalized if something they try doesn’t work out. They share their successes, experiments, and failures and everyone learns from the experience. That’s the kind of collaborative learning schools expect from students and Dobyns thinks it’s important that teachers experience and practice it too.

TRANSITION CHALLENGES

Opening or converting to a New Tech school can mean some growing pains.

“It’s almost a month of de-programming,” said Randy Hollenkamp, director of Bulldog Tech in San Jose, one of the few middle schools New Tech has begun to pilot. When kids enter his seventh grade they are so used to the traditional school system, they don’t know how to work collaboratively on projects. “At first their grades go down just because it’s projects. It’s actually kind of harder because you have to be a self-learner.” In traditional schools, kids are constantly being directed, so they don’t have to think for themselves as much, Hollenkamp said.

“Every year, as you grow into it, it’s difficult for the group of students who aren’t a part of New Tech,” said Jason Witzigreuter, principal of Adams Central in Monroe, Indiana. Adams Central is a unique school in the New Tech Network because it is a K-12 school under one roof, but only the high school uses New Tech’s model. Witzigreuter calls his school a hybrid model and a learning experience. The school is three years into the experiment, which means the seniors are the only class without their own laptops and without some of the communication and presentation skills that the freshmen quickly pick up.

“Our kids at a lower grade are able to understand how to collaborate better and use those soft skills, or 21st century skills, better because they’ve been taught that through New Tech,” Witzigreuter said. He tries to use the younger students’ success to encourage seniors into demonstrating the same kinds of higher order thinking and maturity.

[RELATED READING: How Can Teachers Prepare Kids for a Connected World?]

From New Tech’s perspective, one of the hardest things about working on a five-year timeline can be school leadership changes. And, like any part of the public school system, funding cuts can affect whether a district is able to continue to pay for the program.

COSTS

New Tech’s model is not cheap. It costs about $100,000-$120,000 per year for each school. That hefty fee includes support, training, professional development, and access to the knowledge and experience of all the other schools in the network. Still, to pay for it, districts have done everything from pass school bonds, apply for state innovation grants, apply for private foundation grants and beg districts for the money. In addition to New Tech’s service fees, schools have to pay for the technology that accompanies the program and often facility redesign to foster more collaborative “studio” spaces.

Though it’s a big price tag, the principals interviewed at three New Tech schools thought the money was well spent. Success For All is another school development program that uses a “whole school” model at the elementary school level. They estimate that for 500 students, their program costs $120,000 in the first year and decreases to $50,000 in the second year, finally reaching $30,000 in the third year. High schools programs generally cost more than elementary programs, though.

NEW DIRECTIONS

New Tech has proven that its model is scalable, in part with extra cash from its parent company KnowledgeWorks. Now they’re trying to see if it can work beyond high school. In the past year New Tech has opened 10 middle schools in various states and is dipping into the elementary school scene as well. They’re also trying to find ways for districts to expand the model to other schools nearby on their own. “The first New Tech School can be an anchor in their district and then the strategies can spread across the schools,” Dobyns said. Leaders and teachers at the anchor school could act as trainers and coaches to others, lowering the cost of transitioning future schools.

Flickr: UTCI Library

Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, have forced universities to reconsider their value in light of free high-quality education available online. Coursera, a private company founded by two Stanford professors has been at the forefront of that movement, actively courting new institutions of higher education to their portfolio and trying to monetize the effort by certifying courses for college credit. Now they’re expanding that model to K-12 teacher professional development.

The courses will be free to teachers, and for those who want a verified certificate, there will be a $50 fee. Coursera will verify that the teacher actually completed the course and participated fully along the way.

“In speaking to school administration leaders, I was hearing over and over that many districts today don’t have the resources to deliver good professional development,” said Andrew Ng, co-founder of Coursera. For teachers, Ng said offering professional development online gives them more choices and could save districts money.

Coursera is partnering with schools of education at the University of Washington, University of Virginia, Johns Hopkins and Vanderbilt University. In addition, the company is expanding its network of trainers beyond universities to include cultural institutions like the Exploratorium and the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA).

“It was the most natural thing in the world,” said Deb Howes, director of digital learning at MOMA. “It’s impossible to reach all the teachers who need and want our information, so when Coursera said they had this idea, we said absolutely, great, because we have so much to share with teachers.”

The MOMA course is called the “Art of Inquiry” and uses art as a lens to help teachers learn how to instruct students to describe the world around them, infer information from primary sources, and foster conversations based on inquiry. “How do you train your students to look more deeply and make connections between what they’re seeing and experiencing” — that’s the question the course will try to answer. It’s a four-week course aimed at teachers of grades four to 12.

[RELATED READING: Five Big Changes to the Future of Teacher Education]

Howes said the museum has been offering professional development for teachers on a more limited scale for many years and working with Coursera will give them a much bigger platform to share what museum trainers have learned along the way.

“It’s an experiment with new ways to provide equally compelling experiences for teachers,” said Bronwyn Bevan, the associate director of programs at the Exploratorium, another institution offering courses. The Exploratorium has a long history of training teachers in hands-on science learning. The museum will offer courses on how to bring tinkering to elementary and middle school learning, as well as a course on integrating engineering into middle school. The Exploratorium’s in-person teacher training courses reach about 500 teachers a year and are very hands on. Bevan says the museum is excited to find ways to offer the unique Exploratorium experience virtually.

Coursera has been offering advice to the participating partners on how to organize and shape a class meant for tens of thousands of students. “Teaching a MOOC you have to be far more organized than you do in a regular class because students can’t interact with you, the faculty, directly,” Ng said. “That demands a greater level of clarity in anything you say as compared to an on-campus class.” He also emphasized short, dynamic video clips and frequent interactive quizzes to keep learners engaged.

But can a MOOC-like professional development course offer the same benefits as in-person training? Norton Grubb, an education professor at the University of California, Berkeley said the most common and cheapest form of professional development districts currently offer is a one-size-fits-all lecture provided by an outside consultant on a topic that teachers can’t control.

“What works best are groups of teachers within a school working with one another on a particular problem,” said Grubb. “The important part is the interaction among the teachers which is something that’s very hard to replicate on a MOOC or any kind of online program.” Many of the issues teachers face in the classroom are site specific and can best be solved over a longer period of time with a dedicated effort by a group of peers, he said. Grubb doesn’t think the one-size-fits-all approach is good, and he’s wary of the MOOC approach until it has been proven to work.

[RELATED READING: Is Peer Input as Important as Content for Online Learning?]

But teachers say they are already learning a lot from peers online through social media; they’re connecting to one another and forming learning communities that spread around the globe. “I think there are some things we can do to spread expertise with this thing called the Internet and well-designed virtual learning communities that could actually break down these barriers that exist between teachers,” said Barnett Berry, founder of the Center for Teaching Quality, a non-profit that has been incubating teacher ideas around online professional development for several years.

Berry supports the idea of MOOCs for professional development in theory because he’d like to see teachers be able to choose and direct their own learning. But he thinks success hinges on skilled virtual facilitators who both know the subject matter and how to foster high quality discussion and communication online in order to make it work well. And he doesn’t stop there — he’d like to see a lot of things change including more time for teachers to collaborate within schools, share practices and observe one another.

A lingering question around Coursera’s new efforts will be whether districts accept the new courses as Continuing Education Units, which are used to determine where teachers fall on the pay scale and help them to maintain teaching credentials. Those decisions will be made locally, but will raise questions about how to ensure teachers complete the courses themselves and how they should be counted within existing systems.

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With a new generation of teachers coming into the work force, there’s a discrepancy between what principals expect of teachers-in-training and what they’re actually learning in school.

A new Project Tomorrow report surveying principals concluded that they want to hire new teachers with creative ideas about how technology can be leveraged to create authentic and differentiated learning experiences. But student-teachers report that their tech training focuses only on simple management tools. At the same time, the report concludes that those who have the biggest influence on new teachers — veteran educators –  don’t always embrace new ways of using technology to engage students.

Only half of current working teachers believe they can use technology to motivate students to learn, compared to 75 percent of incoming teachers. Only 17 percent of current teachers believe technology can help students deeply explore their own ideas, compared to 59 percent of incoming teachers. And 26 percent of current teachers believe students can use technology to apply knowledge to problem-solving, compared to 64 percent of aspiring teachers.

Teachers-in-training say coursework focuses on technologies that help a teacher stay organized, rather than ways to engage students. In their methods courses, where teachers learn the mechanics of running a classroom, 71 percent report that they’re taught to use simple word processing, spreadsheets and database tools, 64 percent report learning how to create multimedia presentations and 55 percent say they’ve learned how to use interactive whiteboards.

“Principals want new teachers to know how to use technology to create authentic learning experiences for students (75 percent) and how to leverage technology to differentiate instruction (68 percent) before they apply for a position at their school,” the report said.

Additionally, principals hope new hires will use social media to connect and communicate with students and parents, as well as their ability to integrate mobile devices, social media, and other digital instruction into their daily teaching. Principals also recognize that a move towards self-directed learning means that new teachers will have to have strong classroom management skills. Almost half of principals surveyed said incoming teachers should have the ability to manage a classroom where students are using their own mobile devices and 25 percent would like teachers to know how to teach an online class.

EXPECTATION VS. REALITY

But there’s a disparity between what principals expect from new hires and what teachers-in-training are learning. A full 72 percent of pre-service teachers report they think they’re being well-prepared to use technology in the classroom. That may be because this is a generation of teachers who grew up using technology — 61 percent use smartphones, preferring them for daily tasks. They are also much more likely to use social media, online discussion boards and other Internet tools to enhance and direct their professional development.

[RELATED READING: Amidst a Mobile Revolution in Schools, Will Old Teaching Tactics Work?]

These incoming teachers appear to be caught between generations. They use technology fluidly in their own lives and to enhance their education, but they’re learning to teach within a system that lags behind the times. Sixty-eight percent of teachers-in-training report they rely most heavily on field placements to learn about how to integrate technology into the classroom. They also watch their professors and take advice from peers.

There was a similar disconnect on metrics about how technology can improve the way educators teach. Teachers-in-training thought technology could help them be more organized, create more interactive lessons, make learning student-centered and would encourage students to be more self-directed, while experienced teachers were much less enthusiastic.

The report attributes the optimism to two main factors. One, teachers-in-training grew up with technology and aren’t afraid to figure out how to make it work in class. They’re also more comfortable looking for resources online and using social media to collaborate with peers. Secondly, as they were growing up they witnessed attempts at technology integration from their own teachers and they have a sense of what works and what doesn’t.

By Anne Jolly

Excited and inspired about the subjects they teach, math and science educators ideally want their classrooms to dive into real-world challenges. But they’re faced with the predictable realities of the school day when designing their curriculum. Each year, students seem to lose interest as the subjects become more difficult and abstract. “And what use is this anyway?” students. Why should they learn it?

Though educators know that real-world application would help students engage more fully with the subjects and understand the vital role in solving real problems, they’re overwhelmed by how to make this happen. Just a few of their obstacles:

• “My school system has an obsessive focus on student testing, and that’s all they want me to teach toward – test objectives, test objectives, test objectives.”
• “Our course of study has so many objectives to teach that I don’t have the time to go deeply into any one area – at least, not in the way that STEM teaching requires.”
• “I have no control over what I teach or when I teach it. I have to stay with the pacing guide. I even have to teach flowering plants in January!”
• “I don’t have time to teach STEM curriculum. In fact, I don’t even have time to plan STEM lessons. And I don’t have materials and equipment for hands-on activities in all the classes I teach.”

STEM teachers need ongoing professional development to strengthen and develop the expertise they need to teach these complicated subjects. To that end, some ideas:

• Engineering experiences for teachers. These might be summer programs that allow middle-school teachers from STEM fields to work with engineers and scientists. Are there industries in your area that might provide those opportunities?
• Summer STEM camps and workshops for teachers. These should use a problem-solving approach and provide teachers with tools to integrate STEM applications into their lessons.
• Higher education partnerships. Nearby colleges might provide subject area updates to keep K-12 teachers of math and science on the STEM cutting edge.
• Ongoing in-school collaboration among science and math teachers. Support is urgently needed so that teachers in these core STEM subjects can continue learning in their content areas, work together to develop and coordinate lessons, assess the impact on students, and hold each other accountable for incorporating STEM into their lessons.

This last piece should be considered seriously: Why not start a professional learning team to focus specifically on learning and teaching STEM? Without regular, supportive collaboration, intended changes in classroom teaching often don’t stick. Imagine that all teachers of math and science in your school are on board with teaching STEM and are continually working together to improve their teaching in this area. Imagine that school and system leaders have the courage to step off the test prep train and support a project- and inquiry-based approach to instruction. Would all this make a difference for students?

Despite pressures and roadblocks, well-prepared teachers who have opportunities for continual learning can succeed at developing successful STEM classroom initiatives on their own. Educators can build quite an extensive toolkit of resources from a number of reputable sites.

• The PBS Teachers STEM Education Resource Center introduces a number of selected STEM education resources including lesson plans, videos, science, math, technology, and engineering resources at all grade levels. In fact, their STEM database contains nearly 4,000 science, technology, engineering, and math resources for grades preK-12.
• Intel Design and Discovery site focuses on guiding students ages 11-15 to experience engineering through the design process. This site offers a comprehensive inquiry-based curriculum which introduces students to all the components of a good STEM project.
• The Teach Engineering digital library provides teacher-tested, standards-based engineering content for K-12 teachers to use in science and math classrooms. Engineering lessons are mapped to educational content standards. In addition, suggested materials are usually inexpensive, and activities are relevant to children’s daily lives.

By Ben Stern, EdSurge

The enemy of innovation and growth is routine. These auspicious weeks before the school year commences are the perfect time to create a new routine that will ensure innovation in your instruction and growth as an instructor. Here are some idea for those who want to take advantage of these next few weeks to guarantee the best year they’ve ever had.

1. MOVE BEYOND THE TEXTBOOK

Textbooks are by nature restrictive. The chapter order is an imposition; the information within the book is only as current as the publication date. If you can, liberate yourself from the book! If you don’t have the luxury of foregoing textbooks altogether, you can still supplement them.

The first step is to choose a destination for the resources. If your school doesn’t already use a Learning Management System like Moodle or Blackboard, there are some excellent, free resources. Edmodo looks and feels a bit like Facebook but with education-friendly features like assignment postings, quizzes, due dates, and more. If you’d prefer more customizability and care less about the aesthetics of your destination you could build a wiki with your students on Wikispaces.

Once you set up your destination, you can begin to aggregate content and resources. Put a few resources up for the beginning of the year, but then invite students to contribute much of the material thereafter–an excellent strategy for enriching students’ learning. For instance, you might have students find interesting websites that relate to the themes of each chapter of the text. Students can then guide the class with their discoveries. You could have students rewrite sections of the textbook based on these resources and collect the best submissions in a wiki that becomes a sort of “living” textbook for your particular class. You can even invite students to discuss subject-related Youtube videos in an Edmodo discussion board, then pick up the discussion in class the next morning as a warm-up. Now is the best time to work out the kinks in these platforms (of which there are only a very few) and develop unit plans that make full use of them. You’ll thank yourself later (as will the students)!

2. BECOME AN EXPERT IN ONE TOOL

There are at least half a dozen apps and software for every job. Should you use Diigo, Delicious, eduClipper, Pinterest, or BagTheWeb to collect links? Is Photoshop, GIMP, Pixlr, or FotoFlexer the right photo-editing software? It’s overwhelming, and there really is no single right answer. (For the record, though, Diigo is great because of its iOS app and GIMP works well because it’s both free and powerful.) So pick one class of tools and become a ninja in how to use one of the leading tools in that class. Skills from one platform are transferable to the others. You will benefit from learning everything about whatever tool you choose.

3. READ ABOUT ALL THINGS EDUCATION

In the middle of the school year, a good novel sounds much more compelling than a book on education. But books on pedagogical theory can influence your instruction in meaningful and enduring ways even if they are short on immediate, practical advice. Reading books about math pedagogy have helped educators teach more linear, logical concepts like cause and effect analysis using timelines or even Roman battle strategies. Here are some favorite books from a summer reading list:

Scaling Up Success
Education Nation
The Students Are Watching
Reinventing Project-Based Learning

4. REVISIT YOUR HOMEWORK STRATEGY

Flipping is not just for math. The essential justification for flipping – that is, utilizing technology to redistribute tasks between homework and classwork to make both more meaningful – can benefit any class. Are there individual activities that you could turn into homework in order to devote more attention to students in class? Is there a tangential class discussion that you want to continue but can’t justify doing during precious class time?

To flip your lectures, you’ll need some kind of software. Camtasia is the crème de la crème of flipping software, but it’s expensive. An alternative is to film your lecture with your phone, edit it with Windows Live Movie Maker or iMovie, and post it to Youtube as an unlisted video, and use the discussion board to allow your students to ask and answer questions.

But you don’t necessarily need to post a lecture on-line to flip your class. Any aspect of your class can be flipped. An English teacher asked her students to conduct discussions of each reading assignment on her Edmodo page. Some students were responsible for posting a discussion question, others for being first responders, and others for posting follow-ups. Then, every student had to respond to another discussion thread also. The roles rotated and were staggered over a few days so that timing issues were minimized. We found that the students retained the reading better when they had to engage with their classmates immediately. In class, they would apply their understanding of the reading in some creative endeavor like a skit and discuss the essential meaning of the text at the very end of class. The extra time afforded to the students by the meaningful work they did the night before allowed them to access the core of the text much more effectively.

5. MAKE A PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT SCHEDULE

A formal principal used to tell the kids: “Ask for it and you just might get it!” The same sentiment applies to teachers. Funds are limited in every school and they become increasingly scarce as the school year progresses. Get your requests in now. Look for major conferences in your nearest city and peruse the blogs, Twitter, and EdSurge for other educators’ assessments of previous year’s events. To demonstrate your genuine commitment to regular PD, also “attend” some free webinars such as these from ASCD or these from EdWeek. Watch TED talks about education and peruse Teaching Channel for lesson plan inspiration. Your administrators will be more inclined to encourage your continued learning, and you will get that much-needed “shot in the arm” on a regular basis.

Your teaching is only as good as your learning. During the madness of a school year, it’s very difficult to begin any new endeavor that doesn’t relate directly to your class. So use these final dog days of summer to set yourself up to be a learner for the rest of the year.

This piece was reprinted from EdSurge-Instruct, a weekly newsletter for educators on education technology products and great practices.

Ben Stern writes the “Because You Asked” column for EdSurge. He is also the Technology Integrationist for a middle school in New York City. Earlier in his career, he revamped his curriculum using computers and the Internet, replacing textbooks with scholarly sources and leveraging the connectivity afforded by the Internet to contextualize content. Since then, Ben has found a passion in the evolution of education through technology and works to help teachers enhance their curriculum wherever possible. You can follow him on Twitter at @EdTechBSt

Flickr: Rosaura Ochoa

By The Hechinger Report

Twitter and Facebook might soon replace traditional professional development for teachers. Instead of enduring hours-long workshops a few times a year, teachers could reach out to peers on the Internet in real time for advice on things like planning a lesson (or salvaging a lesson that’s going wrong), overcoming classroom management problems, or helping students with disabilities.

Or, at least, that’s what a group of Internet-savvy educators who convened in New York City this week are hoping.

“Being connected [through social-networking sites] is an opportunity for growth anytime, anywhere,” said Steve Anderson, director of instructional technology for the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools in North Carolina, speaking yesterday at the second annual #140edu conference, a reference to Twitter’s 140 character limit for tweets. A teacher can go on Twitter, he added, and “learn 10 new things.”

Traditional forms of on-the-job training for teachers have been much-maligned in recent years by experts and by teachers themselves. “Many times professional development is like herding cattle: We’re taking everybody in the same direction. We’re going to learn the same thing,” said Eric Sheninger, principal of New Milford High School in northern New Jersey.

For-profit companies, nonprofits and universities make lots of money providing training to schools, but little research exists on what types of professional development for teachers work best. Increasingly, schools and districts are adopting what experts say are more promising ways of training teachers that involve more coaching and teacher collaboration.

But some educators who attended the #140edu conference want to push the envelope further, to make teacher training even more individualized and self-directed. Among the attendees were teachers and principals who keep blogs documenting their daily travails and successes in the classroom, which work as guideposts for others and forums where they can glean tips. Some have thousands of Twitter followers and Facebook friends.

Kyle Pace, an instructional technology specialist for the Lee’s Summit School District, near Kansas City, gave an example of how personal networks and crowd-sourcing on the Internet could improve on the old ways of training teachers:

“A teacher could be teaching a lesson on the Civil War. That lesson could bomb. They could go to their network, pose a question, ask for a resource. In the next period they could have new resources, things to try immediately,” he said.

“Traditional professional development can’t offer that immediacy of being a connected educator,” Pace added.

In-person interaction shouldn’t be completely discarded, however, said Sheninger, who says he has revolutionized his school partly through help from people he met via Twitter. “I value my face-to-face connections more than I do my virtual ones,” he said. “Technology flattens our ability to connect with people. It just makes things easier. It’s not the only way I connect with people.”

Indeed, at the conference, a room set aside for in-person mingling and chatting was often more crowded than the auditorium where panelists were giving their talks.

This post is published on The Hechinger Report.