Project Participants
The main participants in our inquiry project are TOCs. Through our project we hope to connect TOCs to technology in classrooms. TOCs don’t normally know what technologies are available until they walk through the door or have been in the class before. There is a wide spectrum of technology use in the district and in the school. Hopefully our inquiry project will give the TOC the opportunity and resources to bring ICT into their temporary classroom.
In addition, we hope to connect TOCs with other TOCs. Being a TOC can be lonely and isolating experience. It’s difficult to make any meaningful connections in a school or classroom when you’re only in the school or classroom for a day. There are district TOC committees and they organize TOC events, but most TOCs don’t participate (I, being one of them). I, honestly, never really had the desire to go any meetings; either I was busy, wasn’t interested or didn’t find it relevant. By providing an ICT database, it gives a reason for TOCs to visit our site. We hope this can hook TOCs onto the other resources that we offer: a blog, ICT resource list, and ideas/guidelines on how to incorporate ICT into their lessons. Through the blog, teachers are able to connect and share their experiences and thoughts. If we can allow other TOCs to submit their ideas and resources, this could be the initial steps to building a TOC learning group or community.
Considering our participants’ history and experience with ICT, we acknowledge that there will be a wide range of ICT skills and knowledge, as well as, teacher experience. But we have made some assumptions when creating our project. 1) Since, TOCs have graduated some type of education/teaching program, they will have some ideas on how to technology can facilitate teaching. 2) Because most people use some type of ICT on a daily basis (ie phone, computer, laptop, tablet, etc.), we assumed that TOCs, being people of the general population, will have a basic understanding and knowledge of ICT and will be familiar with the key language and technological terms.
The challenges you face: getting TOCs to participate in your site, are not much different than getting other educational professionals to participate in online networks. As I see it, your project is not only changing TOC culture (from isolating to sharing), it is also changing teaching culture (contributing to an online information repository about teaching for teachers). The added benefit is that you are going to be compiling an inventory of ICT resources as perceived by TOC. I am very interested to see how this works out.