Running head: INDIVIDUAL TEACHER TECHNOLOGY ASSESSMENT 1

Individual Teacher Technology Assessment

Trent Stapleton

Kennesaw State University

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Ms. Smejkal is one of five English Language Learners (ELL) teachers at Hembree Springs

Elementary School. She is the ELL instructor for the kindergarten and lower level first grade students.

Ms. Smejkal has been teaching for 26 years, all at the elementary level and all as an ELL teacher.

Throughout the day, Ms. Smejkal has anywhere between 3 and 9 ELL students in her room at a time, and

occasionally, she works with students in a 1 to 1 setting.

In Ms. Smejkal’s classroom, she has 6 desktop computers with headphones, a Promethean

Whiteboard and one teacher laptop. While not always in her room, she has access to iPads and student

laptops if or when needed. Ms. Smejkal is able to see each of her students for 45 minutes every day.

With each student, Ms. Smejkal has a personalized learning program to help build literacy and speaking

skills. She primarily works with students from families that have recently moved to the United States

from another country and have had very little, if any at all, access to English language education.

Ms. Smejkal recently completed two surveys intended to establish individual needs and set

specific goals in the use of instructional technology in the ELL classroom. The first survey was written to

determine Ms. Smejkal’s level of comfort with using technology. The second survey was written to

better understand Ms. Smejkal’s ability to integrate technology into the classroom. Using both surveys,

Ms. Smejkal and I were able to develop some baseline understandings of her ease of access to and use

of technology in her classroom. Together, these surveys help to find the best practices for coaching and

helping Ms. Smejkal find the most effective uses of technology in her classroom.

Levels of Technology Use Surveys

The first survey was used to determine Ms. Smejkal’s ability to adapt to and use new

technology. Ms. Smejkal is a self-described tech junkie from the late 70s and early 80s. Admittedly, Ms,

Smejkal has never sought out new technologies, however, she has always been able to understand and

use new technology with very little effort. The exception being, in the last ten years she believes that as
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much as technology has grown and moved forward, she has stalled out and fallen behind (T. Stapleton,

personal communication, 2018).

The survey results show that Ms. Smejkal enjoys using technology in her personal life and that

she usually enjoys learning and sharing new technologies with her colleagues. Because of her lack of

understanding, and her comfort with tools that she is already familiar with, Ms. Smejkal has rarely

sought out any new technologies to include in her classroom. She explained that frequently the district

will require a new technology component and she has accomplished the bare minimum out of lack of

time, training and desire to learn the new tools. She has been frustrated in the most recent years with

how frequently a new tool is presented without adequate training, adopted by the district, and then

replaced by a new tool within a few years (T. Stapleton, personal communication, 2018).

Based on these survey results, Ms. Smejkal agrees that she would like to find new technologies

that can have a lasting and effective impact on her classroom and the students with which she works.

While Ms. Smejkal believes that at one time she would have been considered an early adapter, currently

she is a late majority or laggard. She claims this is due to the lack of training that she has receive over

the years and the frustration with the way that the district has pushed technology. Her goal is to return

to the early adapter category.

The second survey show that Ms. Smejkal is currently at a Level 1 on the Level of Technology

Integration (LoTI) scale (LoTI Framework, 2011). While Ms. Smejkal uses technology daily in her lessons

(PowerPoint), there is very limited use by students and the PowerPoint presentations are almost all

identical from day to day. She has been hesitant to change to a different tool or strategy because of all

of the time and effort that she put into creating the PowerPoints. She believes that earlier in her career,

before she was an educator, she would have landed higher in the LoTI scale, but she has struggled to

find the best ways of integration technology while working with students at such low levels of English
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comprehension. It has been difficult to find technology tools that she can use in different languages, as

many of her students do not read or write in their native language either.

Technology Use in Action

Ms. Smejkal describes her “stall” in technology use came about as the districts began to push

technology into the classroom. While she felt like she was prepared to use technology in the classroom,

the new tools that were being provided came without adequate training and preparation. She has

struggled while watching younger teachers enter the field with new technologies and strategies, and has

felt lost for several years as the district and administration has required different tools in the classroom.

Shortly after my initial conversations with Ms. Smejkal, and only a few days after completing the

two surveys, Ms. Smejkal scheduled some time to work with me after a teacher work day. She was

extremely frustrated after the training provided that day on the use of OneNote and other various Office

365 tools. She stated that what made her most upset about the training was the lack of depth of the

training (T. Stapleton, personal communication, 2018). The training was for approximately 30 teachers,

all of various levels of skill and understanding of Office 365 tools, and lasted approximately 1 hour. She

said she left the training feeling overwhelmed and unsure of where or how to begin using some of the

tools presented. Knight writes “teachers do not resist change so much as they resist poorly designed

change initiatives”, and I believe that Ms. Smejkal has been the result of a series of poorly designed

professional development opportunities over her career (Knight, 2007).

Despite the negative experience that was the Office 365 training, it opened the door for Ms.

Smejkal and I to look more closely at the Office 365 tools and how they impact her students and her

professional learning community (PLC) moving forward. We were able to establish a weekly

appointment to look at the use of these tools, develop effective lessons plans that integrate technology

into the classroom, and plan effective and authentic learning opportunities for her students.
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Technology Needs and Goals

The immediate need for coaching is to gain a stronger understanding of the use of Office 365

tools and how they can impact student learning. We began by comparing Office 365 with the traditional

Office products (Word, Excel, PowerPoint). It helped her to understand that these tools were things that

she was already comfortable with and that we needed to more clearly understand what adding cloud

services (Office 365) meant for her students and her PLC.

After gaining a stronger understanding of Office 365, we then looked at the uses of OneNote

and Class Notebook. The goal of using OneNote will be to help better organize her lesson plans and

activities using the Notebook features. We created a Notebook for her PLC so that she can share and

learn with her PLC members. We then continued to organize some of her current lesson and activities

into her new Notebook.

While it can be extremely difficult to incorporate word processing tools with her ELL students,

she expressed her desire to have her students begin building a learning portfolio using Seesaw and she

would like to see her students incorporate more speaking activities using Flipgrid or Recap. Each week

we will look at a new tool, develop a lesson that will allow the incorporation of the tool, and reflect on

the previous week’s tool. The ultimate goal of the coaching opportunity is to provide Ms. Smejkal with

appropriate, effective and easy to use tools to accomplish the difficult task of personalizing the learning

of each of the students in her class. Using the partnership approach to coaching will allow me to work

closely with Ms. Smejkal to choose, learn, and utilize the best practices and tools in her classroom.
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References

Knight, J. (2007). Instructional coaching: A partnership approach to improving instruction. Thunder Oaks,

CA: Corwin Press.

T. Stapleton, personal communication, February, 2018.