Project Challenges
Ideas won’t keep. Something must be done about them. – Alfred North Whitehead
“Ideas Won’t Keep” by Brad MacDuff
Having the best idea, but not following through with actions, is equivalent to having no idea in the first place. Terrence and I have spent a large amount of effort and time creating our website and realizing our idea, but our work isn’t complete. We need TOCs to buy into our idea, that this is a valuable endeavour. I don’t think it will take too much convincing that it fills a need for ICT knowledge in our current TOC system. But in my opinion, our major obstacles are to get the TOCs onto our website and to get them to contribute to the ICT database. Currently our database is empty and will remain empty until we get more responses to our survey. In the beginning stages, I will be the main database contributor, but hopefully as more TOCs become aware of the website, the database will grow. It is crucial to get more TOCs involved and using the website. If it doesn’t get used, what would have been the point of it all?
Letting people know…
In my last blog I listed a few ideas that we can use to inform TOCs about our website. We thought of using the TOC committee in our districts to assist us in circulating our website around through the community. But upon reflection from my own experience, I’m not sure that one of our suggestions will truly reach our target audience. One idea was to email the TOCs through our district wide email, but not all TOCs have a district email. When I first started TOCing in the district, I had to contact the head office to get a district login and email. If we send out a district wide email, those TOCs without district logins will not be receiving our email. I think this issue should be brought forth to the district head office, possibly with the HR department. District logins and email addresses should be discussed in the TOC orientation. Furthermore, if a TOC is unable to log into the district server, that hinders his/her access to the ICT in the classroom. You won’t be able to use the teacher computer, classroom computer or wifi, which are the most common ICTs found in the classroom. Even if the TOC had an amazing lesson using ICT, without access he/she wouldn’t be able to use it in the classroom.
Therefore, the first thing to tell a TOC who wants to integrate ICT meaningfully into their temporary class….get a district login!
This following up on Terrence’s idea from your last blog post, which was opening up to the TOC community in other districts. First, I think there are TOCs that work in more than one district. Second, I was thinking you could let new teachers graduating from teacher education programs in British Columbia, there are 8 of them, I think, that there is a TOC information site that they might want to participate in. If you open up to other districts, you are probably going to get more use.