New technology programs are constantly being developed by various companies and a lot of these programs are being adopted by districts. In my own experience when my district adopts a new piece of technology we are given one and even in a few cases two professional developments based on these new programs or devices. In this past school year, my district adopted the program Dreambox which, is an interactive math enrichment game-style application. In my master’s program through SPU, we were given the opportunity to conduct a program evaluation. For this project, I decided to evaluate this newly adopted program to find out how staff in my building were implementing this in their classroom and their overall experience with Dreambox. After conducting this project, I decided to dig deeper into the needs of the staff when it came to Dreambox and then develop two professional developments based on those needs.
To identify the needs of my staff I conducted both a survey and personal interviews.
Below is the menu option that staff will from (still under construction)
Class Option #1 Exploring and assigning activities
When interviewing different staff members I found common trends among their answers. One thing that kept appearing was staff members saying “I don’t know what the lessons are asking students so its hard for me to help them when they get stuck”- 2nd grade teacher. Based on the information collected the first professional development we are creating is activity exploration. Within Dreambox you can play all of the same investigations as your students. When I informed some staff of this option they didn’t even know that it was an option. For this breakout session students will either complete activities in Adventure Park (K-2) or Paper Frenzy (3-5).
Class Option #2 Dreambox Fundamentals
When first adopting Dreambox we were given a quick overview at the very beginning of the school year from the Dreambox company. Since then we haven’t had any professional development since related to this program. During my time interviewing and reading the survey results staff members felt like they overall didn’t think Dreambox was easy to use or it was taking too much time to navigate within Dreambox. In this breakout session staff with get a small group and one to one help exploring the basic features of Dreambox. We will be covering classroom rosters, setting initial placement levels, reports (activities, standards, assignfocus). This session will also allow for teachers to ask any specific questions they might have about using this program.
Conclusion and Reflection
When starting this project I honestly didn’t know what kind of results I was going to get from the staff in my building. I thought this because each staff member has a different level of technology use in their background. Was I going to get 12 completely different answers? How would I make a PD based around 12 different peoples needs? These were questions I was asking myself through this project. However, as I stated above I found multiple trends among my peers which shaped their upcoming professional development. Running my first professional development has me both anxious and excited. I am excited to help my colleagues to feel comfortable using a require tech program and for their frustrations to ease. I look forward to teaching this PD and want to continue to listen to the staff on their needs in technology.
