Entry 4: A Story to Tell

I loved Parrish's article about design stories. It really smoke to the writer in me. When thinking about the technology integration teacher professional development experience from the two far ends of the spectrum, I was inspired to write their design stories.

A tale of two instructional technology professional development experiences:

Jane’s Story

Here we go again, Jane thinks, as she pulls up a seat in yet another tech tools class. The trainer is already going on about the usefulness of a class website. It doesn’t seem to matter that Jane has had a class website for the past two years. Not only does she have one, but she also works hard to keep it up to date with resources and assignments. She uses it to communicate with parents, students, and the community at large. She sometimes records lectures and posts them for students to review. This is just another waste of my time, Jane sighs as she tunes out the trainer and begins surreptitiously searching the web for resources to use in her next lesson.

Joe’s Story

Here we go again, Joe thinks, as he pulls up a seat in year another tech tools class. The training is already going on about the usefulness of a class website. It doesn’t seem to matter that Joe feels unsure of himself with the word processor program on his computer, much less creating a website. The trainer is using words like tag, discussion forums, and threads, and Joe is already so lost that his head is swimming. He looks around to see many of his colleague following along and setting up their own sites, but he missed some of the opening instructions trying to navigate to the right website. He’s a senior member of his department and doesn’t want to look slow or unknowledgeable by asking the trainer to start over, so he adopts a look of indifference about the whole activity and rolls his eyes when friends look his way. Joe sighs as he tunes out the trainer and begins rethinking the opening he used in class that day and taking notes about how to do it better next time.