A dilemma for many senior leaders in schools is how to secure the vision for E-learning. How do you get staff to buy in and ensure e-adoption rates. I don't think there is one universally accepted answer to this but I am firm believer in getting everyone involved at one level or another to secure at the very least, a basic understanding. Systems driven by content and collaboration are only ever going to be as successful as the people that drive forward innovation and their use within a lesson, hopefully embedding it into the culture of the school. Systems have to be sold to teachers and the best people often to do this are the students themselves. Let's face it, students these days are all digital natives and could pretty much do what the teachers may want them to do through an online learning environment. The challenge is how to engage teachers to want to get involved and engage with, what for many of them is an alien way of learning. Here a Costello we're no different than any other school, yes we're a technology college, but like every other school we have a diverse mix of staff. Some of whom are chomping at the bit to delve into a digital environment along with others saying - what's the point - I don't teach in an ICT room every lesson.
Getting all staff to understand the vision of where the school wants to take E-Learning and buy into it is such an important process, yet I think it is one that sometimes gets overlooked as staff implementing systems want to see a return on their investment so quickly. We launched our Learning Platform with a full staff meeting that was really put in place to fuse together the vision and wrap it up in a way that was accessible to all staff - ensuring that there was the chance for open and honest discussion along with lots of questions. This alone though is not enough - staff need time to process what they have seen and listened to so what we have done at Costello is to actually use the learning platform to educate staff about the learning platform.
Within FROG I have set up a sub-portal within the main staff portal that staff can go to find out about the E-Learning vision at the college, access the multimedia presentation with voice over that was delivered at the initial staff meeting where FROG was launched. They can watch a 7 minute virtual tour of the learning platform that explains all the main functionality - certainly enough to get them started as well access to a getting started guide. There are pages where staff can access video tutorials as well as training documents. There is even a page written specifically for subject leaders that sets out the road map as to how they will need to engage with E-Learning over the next few months - even including a generic action plan for them to use as the basis of shaping their own departmental plan.
What better way to sell the technology than to use it! It's not rocket science - just about using the technology in an innovative way to secure an outcome.
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