Week 4: What Does the Research Say?

You have been developing your own change plan that will involve integrating technology into an existing system to make it more efficient and effective.  This involves building a vision and making it happen. 

As a case study, you read From Fear to Facebook. You have read various articles by Michael Fullan to develop a background in Change Knowledge. This past week, you read about some elements that can be barriers to change.  

This week, I would like you to read a research article that delves into the success of using technology for school improvement.  The researchers, Levin and Schrum, engaged in hundreds of interviews, focus groups and hours of observation in classrooms to learn about how successful educators make change.

Using Systems Thinking to Leverage Technology for School Improvement: Lessons Learned from Award-Winning Secondary Schools/Districts

Put this all together.  Further refine your plan for making change in an existing system. 
Next week we will explore the system that you might use to develop your plan and ultimately use it to create your final project for this class.

Image: The Alternate Economy

Week 3: Continuing to Make Change

Change has a number of aspects to it.

Addressing First- and Second-Order Barriers to Change:  Strategies for Technology Integration
Peggy Ertmer

Why Teachers Must Become Change Agents.
Michael Fullan

The 10 Questions Every Change Agent Must Answer
Bill Taylor

Week 2: Making Change Your Own

Reading From Fear to Facebook provides a wealth of shared experiences concerning change in schools. Levinson's experiences are useful in providing examples of how the process of change works and the challenges that come to pass.

We read Fullen's 8 Forces for Leaders of Change which provided the drivers for creating effective and lasting change.

While Fullen talks about the forces of Leaders of Change in a broader sense, Donald Ely has written about the more specific aspects that affect change in Education.   Read about Ely's Conditions of Change on this website.  It is a good compilation of his work.  You will find a single page that provides to overall review of the work and then each of the 8 aspects are listed in the left column.

Your assignment is to apply these steps of change to a technological change that you would like to see in your school (either where you teach or where you are a student.) This could be one that you would like to initiate or one that your school is already trying to implement and you are analyzing it to see if it has been effectively approached.  This could include using a specific digital tool or a piece of hardware.

1. Describe the technological change that you would like to see.
2. Describe the positive (or negative) impact that you would anticipate using it would have.
3. Proceed through each of Ely's 8 conditions of change and explain how your vision of how the change would address it.  (e.g., Sufficient Knowledge and Skills - explain what needs to be learned and how you would organize teaching it.)
4. Success can be generated by following previously successful examples. For each of the 8 conditions, cite where in From Fear to Facebook (or other references that you know) this was tried and it was successful.

This will be posted in a discussion group on UNI eLearning.  Please read the rest of the postings and provide thoughtful feedback.