We’ve begun to identify the skills that a person in each of the mini-certificate areas should have.
Here we’d like your ideas about what these people need to know for each of these certificates.
Here’s what we think (again, we got some of our information from all of you who attended the workshops!) (You can find out more about what these are in the first blog topic.)
…Teacher support – Need to be able to help teachers deal with:
…Just in time assistance with making equipment work
…Just in time assistance with making equipment work together
…Planning assistance so that when a teacher wants something to happen, this person can provide the expertise to make sure it works (i.e. students need to save large files and be able to access them in several different places to work on them, over a period of time. Or teacher needs to gather observation data while on a field trip…)
…Teacher training for changes in teaching – this person needs to be able to help teacher move from industrial age teaching to teaching for the 21st century, including everything from increasing interactive instruction to teaching groups that consist of students collaborating globally. This person should be prepared to help digital immigrants teach digital natives.
…Curriculum Integration – the person in this role would provide redesign of curriculum to take advantage of the newest technology available. This person would have to keep up with current technology.
…Hardware and software support – This person would be an expert at making sure that the hardware and software work, and would be able to help educators identify ways to make sure that the hardware and software will work they way they expect in their curriculum.
…Network support – Needs to be aware of the latest options and needs to be expert at keeping connections working, install relevant networking capability as needed (and practical).
…Technical support – This person should know enough about networks and hardware and software to do effective budgeting, strategic planning and leadership.
…Technology for Assessment – someone who can use appropriate technology to evaluate and gather data for data driven decision making
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2 comments:
I find these mini-skills too narrow. Would you want a certification for web publishing? digital imaging? podcasting?
The list can go on. I think we need to think about the clusters of skills that will be needed and what is not covered by today's certificate. Based on my work as a mentor with the current certificate program, I feel that the real missing piece is a technology integration specialist.
The present certificate has a variety of key areas that deal with some of the mini-elements. I think we would be creating more challenges for ourselves by going in the direction of mini-skills.
These skills listed for each certificate area seem more like job descriptions. For the tech staff, I think you need industry standards certification. For example, if you are a Windows school, you need a Microsoft systems engineer or the best you can afford. If you have Cisco equipment, you get their certification.
For everything else, we need to bring future employers and higher education to the table in order to ask them what our kids will need to compete with a global marketplace. Everything else should be build by those continuing discussions. We need to constantly revise our checklist and keep all of the certifications as modern as we can. Headhunters are valuable resources that can easily let the program know what the business world is looking for.
Last, I'm a big Malcolm Gladwell fan. In Blink, Gladwell discusses the importance of being nice. He even went as far as to site research that showed that nice doctors don't get sued even if they are not great doctors. But, if doctors lack empathy, they are much more likely to be sued even if they are great doctors. Somewhere in our checklists we must include the human factor. We need to prepare these future employees not just for the task-at-hand, but to become a caring part of their district's community.
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