Payne Academy Faculty

I did an internship at the Tempe Union High School District (TUHSD) in Summer 2001. The internship was a requirement of the Masters in Educational Technology program was in. I opted to get involved in a K-12 related environment as my long term goal was to return to NIE to continue educating teachers. I was not paid as an intern and instead served as a volunteer.

My contact at the TUHSD office asked me to assist with the training of teachers for the Payne Academy for gifted students. The academy was just getting established then: Buildings were still being renovated and a core of teachers had only recently been hired.

The plan was for students of Payne Academy to each have a laptop computer that would give them access to online resources and courses over a wireless network. The course management system was WebCT which resided in servers at the district office.

The core of six teachers did not yet know how to use WebCT. My tasks were to:
1) show the teachers how to use WebCT
2) model instructional strategies while teaching online.

My contact at the TUHSD was the coordinator of this large project and he gave me access to WebCT. Other than that, I worked alone as instructional designer and trainer-facilitator. I was left to identify specific needs and to design and conduct a training program for the teachers within about four months. As I was a volunteer and the materials electronic or online, there was no training budget to speak of.

I made three major contributions to this program. First, I sat in at district and adminstrator meetings to brainstorm and shape the nature of the training. Second, I provided WebCT training for the teachers. Third, I modeled instructional strategies by facilitating teacher discussions online, and when the semester began, facilitated seminar discussions among students.

1. Identifying training needs
I took the minutes at a meeting for generating ideas for training (for teachers) and an online seminar (for students). After I had consulted the stakeholders, my district contact gave me free reign to design activities I deemed fit.

Click on the thumbnail above to minutes of a meeting for ideas on Payne Academy teacher training.

2. WebCT training
I taught the academy teachers both face-to-face and online. First I presented some concepts of online seminars since all the teachers were only familiar with traditional classroom teaching.

Click on the thumbnails above to see a PowerPoint presentation on the concepts I presented and to see a screenshot of the WebCT training area I set up.

The main goals of this presentation were to:
1) describe concepts of an online seminar
2) provide a conceptual understanding of the instructional possibilities of WebCT as a tool.

Click on the thumbnail above to view a job aid (PDF) illustrating how to log in to and use WebCT.

The actual WebCT training was facilitated by means of demonstrations, a job aid (PDF), and participation in online discussions (see below).

Click on the thumbnails above to see screenshots of the WebCT discussion forum used for teacher training.

3. Modeling online instructional strategies
I modeled these strategies while training teachers online before the school term started and while interacting with the students online once term began.

Such strategies included collaboratively setting rules and guidelines, setting expectations and criteria for success, learning to lurk/monitor, various questioning and feedback strategies, etc.

An important resource I used then were readings from the Distance Learning Resource Network (which, unfortunately, does not seem to work any more). I asked the teachers to read about these distance teaching strategies, compare them with what they did in traditional classrooms, and describe how they might need to change their teaching behaviors online.

As a result of my efforts, I was given an award below at a ceremony that was televised on local television. My contact at the district office video taped the ceremony and gave me a copy of the video clip.