On the Trails

There is not a tool that assesses a teacher’s level of technology integration in the classroom in an easy-to-use fashion. The tool I am speaking about has to be as simple as using a tire gauge or a cooking thermometer. My job is to teach teachers how to integrate technology into their curriculum, but I need to give them a quick and easy to use tool to have them self-assess, so I can see where to start.

Instead of continuing my search, I have decided to build this tool. Means and Adams, in their book, Facilitating the Project Lifecycle : Skills & Tools to Accelerate Progress for Project Managers, Facilitators, and Six Sigma Project Teams, wrote about joint application design (JAD) work sessions where colleagues come together to jointly define requirements for the design of an idea, in this case they wrote about they met to design computer systems. I thought that forming a JAD was a great idea for the development of my Level of Technology Integration Tool. Means and Adams also wrote,

Wood and Silver (1989) found that: Use of facilitated group techniques (JADs) reduced time by 40 percent while improving the quality of design results.

I needed to create a JAD and I felt that I could use the Creative Problem Solving Process to facilitate it. In an effort to meet with my JAD team, I found it very hard to find a place where we could meet so that I could facilitate a CPS session. After an hour, I realized that we were not going to meet face-to-face, so one person in my group suggested we do a CPS session online. Since we were all Educational Technologists and very computer savvy, I said sure and that I would get back to them with how. So, I drove home thinking, how am I going to deliver a CPS session to them. Here are the results of my thinking.

Even though we were comfortable with the technologies I chose, I wanted to base my session on the notion, that a relaxed person is a powerful person, a quote by Norman Peale, a quote from Stephen Eiffert’s book, Cross-train Your Brain : A Mental Fitness Program for Maximizing Creativity and Achieving Success. I decided to do an online facilitation from the comfort of everyone’s home.

Justice and Jamieson (1999) in their book, The Facilitator’s Fieldbook, suggested five basic steps when facilitating with technology. Step 1: Determine if there is a need for facilitating with technology. The need was evident, we did not have a physical place to meet to conduct a CPS session and we were all very willing to to try and make it work using the Internet. As Harry Truman once said, “An expert is a fellow who is afraid to learn anything new because then he wouldn’t be an expert anymore,” (Means and Adams, 2005). I am not an expert in anything, so it did not hurt me to try to learn how to develop a CPS session using technology.
Step 2: Select the right technology for the right purpose. If it were not for the Internet and the new tools available for collaboration, the session I conducted could not have been done with such efficiency. I decided that I needed to use technology that would enable us to collaborate. Finding the technologies to do this, took no time at all because my JAD team used all of them every day with each other. These were: Firefox, Skype and Google Documents and Spreadsheets.

I organized the CPS process using my personal web site, bTcacTus.org. I built a video tutorial that explains the CPS process and the roles of each of the participants – http://btcactus.org/cps.cfm?subpage=303771. Links to the software everyone needed as well as all the documents that were going to be used, were setup as subpages off of my web page under the section called Creative Problem Solving.

The next two steps, Step 3: Do session pre-work and Step 4: Take the measures needed to create a successful session seemed to go hand-in-hand to me, so I included them together in the next few paragraphs.

We needed to communicate via voice and instant messaging (IM) in order to do any brainstorming and I, as the facilitator, needed to talk to the participants throughout the process. We used a product called Skype. This is a free communication tool that enables one to talk to another person on the Internet for free. All one needs is a microphone attached to the computer and to install the free software.

According to A. Glenn Kiser, in his book, Masterful Facilitation : Becoming a Catalyst for Meaningful Change, it is important to clarify desired objectives before starting the process. He says a facilitator should ask each individual to answer the following :

1. Our group exists to …
2. We want our activities to result in …
3. We will measure our success by …
4. What we expect of you as a team member is …
5. What you can expect of this organization is …

So, I used Skype to communicate the agenda, explained the process and roles, asked the questions posed by Kiser above, performed a warm-up activity, described our challenge with the relevant data connected to it, to Clarify the Problem and to generate ideas. I found that Kiser’s suggestion focused the group and gave them a clearer understanding of what was to take place in the next few hours. Since none of my JAD team had participated in a session before, Kiser’s questions were a wonderful addition to add to my facilitation question set.

Once the voice collaboration tool was set, I facilitated the use of another tool, Google Documents and Spreadsheets a rival to Microsoft’s Office. As the facilitator, I built all the documents used for converging ahead of time so that I could just copy and paste information from the Skype IMs into the documents so that we could hit ideas, cluster ideas, restate problem statements, perform a PPCO, overcome our concerns and to make a plan of action.

In the last, Step 5. Do follow-up tasks, facilitating using the tools mentioned above has become quite handy. I have learned to recognize when people have exhausted their thinking. So when my JAD team lost complete focus, I stopped the session even though we did not overcome our concerns. However, since the group could access and edit the Google spreadsheet that organized the concerns at any time, we worked on this document asynchronously. It is now complete and I will assemble the group to make a plan of action. We are just a skype call away.

I facilitate our district technology committee meetings and am eager to try an online facilitation again. I do not intend on using Skype, since we will be in the same room and to setup an account with non-tech administrators would be a big waste of time. I do intend to use Google Documents to collaborate on our technology plan and to demonstrate the new powers of facilitation.