Adam Forester

EIPT 5513
Spring 2013
Needs Analysis Paper
Introduction:
At Bethany High School, like in many schools around the country, there has been
a recent push by school leaders to move toward more integration of technology into the
classroom. Over the past two years, to achieve this goal, Bethany schools has provided
to the teachers and the students many new pieces of technology. However, the
hardware is only one piece of the puzzle of successful technology integration. A huge
piece of the puzzle is effective support in the form of professional development on
purchased technology. This paper will identify the need to provide effective professional
development on using technology in the classroom, with emphasis on strategies and
feedback for teachers.
School Demographics:
Bethany High School is located in Bethany, OK, which is just west of the
Oklahoma City Metropolitan area. The Oklahoma Secondary School Activities
Association classifies Bethany Public Schools as class 3A, with an enrollment of around
400 students 9 12. The district has about 200 employees, about 40 of which are high
school teachers. Bethany has a unique student climate, mainly because the school is
made up of a majority of transfer students. This is due to the fact that the school district
itself is very small (only about 1 square mile radius around the school). The area that
this inside the school district itself, is one of the lower income neighborhoods within the
city of Bethany. A large number of transfer students from wealthier neighborhoods,
surrounding the school, lead to a wide variety of student socio-economic backgrounds.
For example, we have children of Oklahoma Senators as well as students that are on
free and reduced lunches. The school is primarily made up of Caucasian students
however there is a growing population of Hispanic students, many of which are English
Language Learners. There is a small population of other demographic backgrounds,
but the two major groups of students are Caucasian and Hispanic.
Target Audience Description:
The Teachers at Bethany High School vary in their levels of experience with
technology, mainly due to age gaps within the school. There has been a recent influx of
younger teachers, however there is still a big population of veteran teachers on the
staff. Many of the younger teachers are technologically literate, however the veteran
teachers seem to not show the same skills. However, even the younger teachers,
although being technology users themselves, have not made the connection to using
technology with the students yet. There could be a number of reasons why these
teachers do not use the technology they have for work in their classrooms. This paper
will try to identify some of these barriers and identify a need for technology use in the
classroom.
All the teachers at Bethany High School teach in a seven-hour day and have one
planning period. On Friday mornings all of the teachers attend either grade level or

subject level Professional Learning Communities (PLCs). This is our first year of PLC
implementation and to this point they have been very successful. We alternate biweekly
between grade-level and subject PLCs. The PLCs are 45 minutes in length and a
PLC-Trained teacher leads each group. This time is not considered part of the schools
professional development time, but has been very helpful for teachers to gain help
developing new programs, helping problem students as well as collaboration between
disciplines. The school sets aside two to three days a semester for professional
development in which they provide district-mandated seminars in addition to district
hired speakers on various topics. Recently the district has turned to some of its own
teacher to provide professional development to the rest of the faculty on new and
exciting things they are doing in their classrooms.
The high school also has one administrator in the building, the principal, as well
as an scheduling/testing counselor. Due to the size of Bethany, many of the subjects
taught at have only one teacher, which limits how much teachers can collaborate about
specific classes. This is also a negative because feedback is often not available for
teachers that want to use technology in subject specific teaching strategies.
There are many resources available for teacher use at Bethany High School. All
of the teachers have the following technology assigned to them and their classrooms: a
Laptop Computer, a LCD Projector or HDTV, an iPad 2 and an AppleTV. There are
also 3 computer labs with 25 to 30 computers in each. The Media Center has about 15
computer workstations and a laptop cart with 20 computers in it. The school also has 2
iPad carts with 25 iPads. Each of these resources can be scheduled or checked out by
contacting the computer teachers or the site technology director. However, at times this
is a hard thing to accomplish. Two of the computer labs are used as classrooms during
the all hours of the day and the remaining one has middle school students in it for two
hours of the day. The media center can be checked out hourly, but with only 15
computers it is very hard for every student to have easy access. It is easier to check
these computer labs out during the fall semester, because during the spring semester
the labs are generally all checked out to the English department for research projects
and for EOI testing later in the year. The iPad carts are the only piece of technology
that could be available for teachers to use on a day-to-day basis, however a majority of
teachers do not use this resource.
Justification of Need:
Although many types and kinds of technology have been identified above, many
teachers have chosen not to utilize them on a consistent basis. As pointed out, this
could be for a number of reasons; however the biggest one seems to be the lack of
professional training on the best ways to incorporate technology into their subjects. For
instance, the high school has 50 student iPads that can be checked out by the teachers
for up to three days at a time. They were purchased by the district at the start of the
year and have been operational and available for the entire 2012-13 school year. There
have been four formal requests to use the iPad carts and about five other requests in
passing. This can either mean one of two things: 1. Teachers dont want to use this
technology, 2. They want to use technology but they dont know how or do not think
they have the time to learn to use it. I believe the large majority of teachers fall in the
second category; however there is a small minority that will not adapt to any new way.

Many of the teachers that I have observed in passing are just simply unfamiliar
with mobile technology, they mainly use their iPad for personal use and many of which
only use it for email or at the very most show a PowerPoint with. This is not their fault,
the iPads were given to us at the beginning of the 2011-2012 school year and we have
had about five 1-hour in-services on how to incorporate them into a classroom. Many of
the teachers that I have spoken with would be more confident to use there iPad in a
more educational setting if they were given more instruction on how.
To support the conclusion that teachers would use technology more in the
classroom with more professional development with 1:1 interaction and feedback about
technology use, I will offer a personal example. Last year I presented to the entire
faculty a presentation on using the iPads as student responders. I introduced the tool
the teachers thought was most useful was the Socrative class responder App. The
week after the presentation I got many questions and comments about teachers trying
and succeeding about using this App on their iPads and using the students iPhones or
Andriod phones (many let the student work in small groups). They loved the interactive
element and immediate feedback of the system. It went on like this for another two or
three weeks and then tapered off.
At the start the teachers had a high confidence level about using technology,
however without consistent feedback on their efforts many of the teachers seldom use
the system now. However, with proper feedback channels and 1:1 help coming up with
ideas and using iPads in the classroom, these tools would probably be used on a more
consistent basis.
Technology Solution:
A successful feed back loop of learnapplyreflect/feedbackapply would
benefit the teachers at Bethany high school to better service the needs of the students
in their classrooms. Teacher that are more apt to use technology in their classrooms
have a better chance of relating the material to the learners. Many of the students at
Bethany have smartphones and many of them own a computer at home. Of the ones
that do not have the devices, the computer labs open at 7:00 a.m. and the classroom
set of iPads 25 and most of the time is enough for an entire class to be 1:1 or 1:2.
My flipped chemistry class is a great example of this. In my classroom I record
video-lectures that the students watch outside of class and in class the students work
off of the Moodle course management site. They take quizzes, respond to research
prompts and interact with each other all via the classroom set of iPads. The students
have really taken to the ownership of their own learning. There are also students
working on labs, doing practice problems, using chemistry apps on the iPads and even
creating videos about the content we are learning. At the first of the year I thought that
there would be more of a learning curve, however I quickly observed that many students
loved have control of their learning.
This is the power of technology, students can control the place and the pace at
which they learn and with that students start to see that value in the art of learning. At a
flipped conference this past summer I heard the following quote:
You can be a good teacher and never use technology, and technology wont turn
a bad teacher into a good one. However, a good teacher, using technology well,
can make great things happen. - Rushton Hurley

Students today are struggling to juggle the rules of school with their lives outside of
school, many of times this leads to them simply shutting down at school or tuning out. If
teachers can use technology to blend those two worlds then school can become a much
more inviting place to learn. However, to do this, teachers must be able to relate to their
students. At Bethany, we have the tools to do this, where we are lacking is the direction
on where to go. With a carefully planned and direct goal in mind more teachers would
be interested in using technology, mainly due to the fact they will have the self-efficacy
to think they can integrate technology successfully in the classroom.
Teach Someone a Technology Project:
In an effort to try to get more teachers to take advantage of the resources that we
have available at Bethany, I have decided to teach one of the English teachers the iPad
app Google Drive. I have used Google Docs for quite a while for both personal and
school purposes with great success. However, up until the recent release of the Google
Drive app the usability of Google Docs on the iPad has been very limited. For instance,
when accessed on Safari more than of the screen on the iPad was taken up by the
keyboard and the toolbars, which left only about two inches of visible area to see the
document text and to work. The release of the Google Drive app solved this problem by
allowing for more room at the top of the document and limiting the toolbars only to
essential ones used for basic documents. They also enhanced the collaborate
properties of Google Docs by making the process of sharing documents with other
Google users very easy to accomplish. This collaborative nature of Google Docs is one
of the main reasons that I chose the Google Drive app to teach.
Collaboration is one of the main focuses of the shift to Common Core in the next
couple of years. Google Docs allow up to 50 students to work together on the same
document at the same time. These documents can also be accessed from any
computer or tablet with an Internet connection because they are stored in the cloud.
This helps to eliminate lost papers and malfunctions with flash/USB drives. These
advantages of Google Docs take great steps to solving some of the problems outlined
above by taking some of the need off of needing a typical computer to do research
projects and other writing assignments. Using the iPads and the Google Drive app
would help lighten the load for English teachers and in turn help teachers from other
disciplines gain access to computer labs and other resources.