The Arc of Mercy's iPad & Google Apps Training

I hosted visitors from another high school, recently.  Since our adoption of 1:1 iPads, this has become a frequent experience. I was explaining how much emphasis we had placed on professional development with Mercy 2.0.  This caused me to consider how our P.D. process had evolved over the past one year.  Fortunately, we did not try to predetermine every step.  Some of the best features of our training have been based on the feedback we received along the way:

Workflow Analysis -  Our consultant, Lucy Gray, urged us to begin the staff development process by focusing on "workflow".  Lucy and administrators held conversations with members of every academic department, discussing how the new tools could accomplish and improve the way they conducted their classes on a daily basis-- assigning, collecting, and evaluating student work for instance.

Unboxing- We had a special "unboxing" basic training event for the staff when they received their iPads.

Super Tuesdays- Our own advanced teachers conducted voluntary after school workshops on key apps  like Dropbox, Evernote, and iAnnotate PDF.  These were extremely well attended.

Creative Commons photo by jeanbaptistparis

"Ten Things" - We wrote learning modules for ten activities that would serve as milestones for staff technical competency.  The activities were required and included using Google Cals, Evernote, iMovie, Moodle, iPhoto, Dropbox and Explain Everything.

Summer Labs

In order to support the quest for the "Ten things", we hosted several drop-in "labs" during the summer.  These were staffed by volunteers, whose only reward was a free lunch.  The turn-out was terrific.  and by summer's end some of the learners had become trainers.

Boot Camp

Our ten new staff members attended three summer mornings of "boot camp", specifically designed to raise the technology bar high for our newbies and to give them a head start on  the iPad.

Rock Stars

For a full day of August in-service we flew in Cheryl Davis from California to give us a keynote address on "retrofitting the Classroom for the iPad."  She, Lucy Gray and some of our in-house technology exemplars conducted workshops through the day.

Design Foundations

All ninth graders were required this year to take a course called Design Foundations.  Much of their time is spent in our new Mac Lab learning how to use photoshop, design web pages and edit using FinalCut Pro X.  Next year we will be offering a Set Design course and a video editing course which have been made possible by this introductory curriculum.  We will also have a second Mac lab next year.  The entire staff was given a presentation on Design Foundations.  The Curriculum Council is exploring ways for courses of all disciplines to reinforce the skills learned in our new course.

iWizards

Our focus on training has shifted to utilizing student expertise.  We have identified, trained and branded a group of iPad users named iWizards.  They will assist in tutoring all members of our community in iPad skills.

Ninth Grade Tech Orientation

The iWizards will be spending a full day together with Lucy Gray at their elbows, creating the Curriculum for this year's Ninth Grade Tech Orientation.  They will create multimedia tutorials to support their presentations on topics like Dropbox, iPhoto, Pages, and iAnnotate PDF.  You will be reading more about this activity on these pages after March 4.

Surveying the Staff

The staff have not even had their iPads for a year, but it is not too early to plan more professional development with them.  Before long we will return to where we started, surveying them to discover what they need to rock their classes with the iPad and Google Apps for Education.  After all, for all the great technology, the teachers remain the key to great instruction.

Mercy iPad In-Service August, 2012

We have set up a very special professional day for our staff, today. The focus will be on integration our iPads into the Curriculum. In fact the general keynote presentation will be titled, "Retrofitting the Classroom for the iPad. Cheryl Davis will be coming from the San Francisco Bay area to deliver her presentation and two other elective workshops Lucy Gray of Chicago has guided us in developing the in-service event. She will also be presenting workshops as will three of our own talented staff members-- Anne Eddy, Susan Smith, and Alison Kline-Kator. Each Mercy staff member will experience three of the following workshops:

Book Creation on the iPad

Collaborative Tools for Notetaking and Mindmapping

Creating Video

Exploring Instructional Uses of YouTube

iPads in the Moodle Environment

iTunes U Content and Courses

The In-Service will be a paperless experience. Lucy has helped us build a public Google Site in the interest of making our efforts transparent and helpful to the greater educational community. Feel free to visit it:

Mercy High School Professional Development

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Screen Shot from one of Cheryl's Workshop web pages

Unique Professional Development for a Unique School!

I have been researching for Mercy 2.0 since July of '11 and I still have not found a school which matches our educational technology profile. Most schools who are considering the iPad as a 1:1 device (1 device for each student) are going to this model for the first time. Mercy, on the other hand, was a pioneer in 1:1 computing. We have invested several years of experience with technology and it is is already a fundamental feature of our school experience. Consequently, most of the "packaged" presentations and workshops that we might investigate for training are ill-suited to our staff's needs. Nevertheless, our experience has taught us that professional development (PD) is crucial for a successful technology roll-out. Therefore, we are putting investing considerable time and money in customized PD that will position us to be leaders in iPad 1:1 instruction.

I thought members of our community (and visitors!) might be interested in seeing an outline of this plan:

April 2 & 3 - Staff iPads Deployed. Just days after the new iPads were announced by Apple, our technology wizards-- Tom James and Gary Bank -- had devices in the hands of our staff so that they could become acquainted with them at their leisure over Easter Break.

April 17 - Unboxing the iPad Staff members became acquainted with their new iPads with an after school orientation program by Dean Haratsaris from Macprofessionals of Novi .

Lucy Gray

April 23 & 24. Department PD with Lucy Gray. Lucy will meet with departments separately to discuss how they iPad may enhance their "Workflow". In anticipation of these meetings, Lucy has provided shared documents, so that everyone will be thinking about our conversations before she arrives. (Too often, I think, PD takes the form of an expert presenter attempting to "Wow" a passive audience). This portion of the professional development is a critical attempt to view her visit as an interactive process that will evolve through the end of this school year, into the next, and beyond. Her stay will conclude with an all-staff presentation on Google Apps, a critical component of our Mercy. 2.0. At this point, Lucy will be firing out lots of application features for teachers to explore this summer.

August 23 - iPad and the Curriculum Lucy will be joined by Cheryl Davis,the curriculum and instruction technology specialist for the Acalanes Union High School District. Based on the input our administrative team gives Cheryl, she will customize a presentation that focuses on how the iPad can increase our productively and be leveraged as a remarkable instructional tool. She and Lucy will help us develop a set of workshops for the day that they and some of our more proficient staff members will lead.

Cheryl Davis

Very exciting stuff. Of course this is just a beginning. But we want everyone to know that Mercy 2.0 is first and foremost about education and people, not machines and software.