The Edtech Teacher: Ambiguous and Obsolete?

Session 3

Robert Keith, Melanie Hutchinson — Trinity School, Collegiate School

Room 1080

If you ask a History Teacher what they do, you can pretty much predict the answer. But with an EdTech Teacher it may well vary and sound rather unwieldy. Then there is the title itself. Computer Teacher? Educational Technologist? Integrationist? Coordinator? In the academic world, technology teachers recast, rebrand, and reinvent themselves and their programs to keep apace. In many ways, if they were truly successful, they may work themselves out of a job. But would they with the new technologies and innovations that bombard us on a daily basis? Perhaps it is time to stop and have a serious conversation about the state of technological education. We are a Tech Director (Melanie) and a Edtech Coordinator (Rob) who work at competing independent schools in NYC. We hope that our Educon group will bring a much wider range of perspectives to this conversation including classroom teachers, administration and technology teachers. The session will be a broader discussion about the impact of technology roles in our schools. In fact, the more diverse the attendees, the richer the conversation will hopefully be.

Conversational Practice

Melanie Hutchinson (Collegiate School, NYC) and Rob Keith (Trinity School, NYC) have been attending Educon since 2010. Although both are active in leading professional development in New York City, this is the first year that they have submitted proposals to Educon. The session will be structured so that conversations that encourage reflection, sharing, and hopefully learning, will take place at many different levels including pairs and whole group. A variety of activities will engage our participants by tapping into the creativity of the group. Thinking will be made visible in a variety of ways including with drawings, post its, and group shares. While our work will be shared on a google doc we also hope to use some participatory apps such as socrative, google forms, and padlet. Our goal is for attendees to gain clarity and enlightenment, as well as practical insights.