TGS Strategic Planning - Technology

Invest orientation time at start of year building on TGS Digital Library with resources and allow teachers to briefly present their top tools and ones they'd like to improve upon

This should linked to a teacher's professional growth plan/annual review. I'm dubious about digital resource libraries--but can be swayed. TGS has a small faculty who work closely together. F2F is a better way to share. We get a lot of milage out of our "Idea Fairs" and that's with a faculty of 80. It's more important to identify a person from whom you can learn than to identify apps, web sites etc. People are the most important resource. Also wonder how the students are brought in as resources...?

While a traditional model of one person putting together a list of resources is quite limited. Our approach digital library is more about being a place for a group to curate resources. Everyone contributes to it and everyone comments on the effectiveness. If a teacher finds, uses and endorses a particular resource - and then shares those finds digitally, we can grow a collection of effective resources. Sharing face to face is important but there is a tendency for great resources to become "hot topics" and then forgotten a few months later. It also is not "inline". Somebody might mention a useful tool but that's not relevant to another at that particular time. If we can capture those recommendations and share them in a central place to be searched then. Finally, TGS continues to have large turnover (and will likely continue to given our nature). Without underpinning shared resources with some kind of "library" a large amount of institutional knowledge goes out the door with every churn. The role of the library is still valid, it just needs to be re-imagined in the context of today's web. Love the "Idea Fair" concept. It's a great idea. Again, I would like to see that "captured" and made available digitally to help grow the organization's knowledge.

OK. Swayed ;)

Built-in time and support for developing digital self and promoting new skills, on a regular basis and in a community setting

We have two 90-minute blocks of in-house professional development/collaboration time every week. TGS could adapt the model easily.

Here's a vid of our first Idea Fair (back then we called it Idea Marketplace): https://socialcam.com/v/xoccsH7e

Ah nice! That's a seriously healthy chunk of time. That definitely needs to be discussed more in the professional development stream.

- Easy export to external site or a package/comprehensive "portfolio" - Connect drafts to final products (blogs, videos, maybe others?) so we can show progress on Spot - RSS embeds in Spot for daily reading - RSS widgets curated by admin to stream outside world into Spot - that's all for now...