Obtaining approval from relevant stakeholder

On Sunday, 4th March 2018 I had the opportunity to talk to the head of school foundation and shared some insight I got during the first F2F workshop with her. It was an informal meeting but effective conversation. A couple of days after that, on Tuesday, 6th March 2018 I had my team meeting and had a change to share with them about the project I am planning to do.

Everyone agreed to make some changes in the school and willing to support the project. As an outcome, we all hope that teachers' skill in using more updated technology will be useful for classroom teaching and it hopefully will create a more engaging learning.

Following up on the positive response from the school board and management team, I prepared an online survey questionnaire right away to collect data of what teachers think about technology usage in class and the frequency of technology usage in classroom teaching. The survey is given using google form application and distributed to the teachers through e-mail and whatsapp messages from Tuesday, 6th March until 12th March 2018.

Sample of questionnaires can be downloaded here.

Here is the survey outcome :

Respondence

37 teachers responsed on the survey, 32 of them are primary school teachers as it is targeted, 5 of them are secondary teachers who have had several years of experience in teaching primary students and 2 of them are anonymous. Among those respondence 40.5% are language teachers (English, Chinese Language and Bahasa Indonesia), 18.9% are Mathematics teachers, 10.8% are Science teachers and 29.7% are teachers of other subjects.

Integrating technology in class

100% of the teachers are aware of the idea about integrating technology in class. 81.1 % of them agreed that it is important to infuse / integrate technology in classroom teaching, while the rest of them are not sure of it yet. They have variety of reasons for that.

Although most of them are aware of the importance of technology usage, 55.9% of them prefer to conduct conventional classes rather than digital classes. Again, reasons are varied.

Computer Usage - Apps and Program Usage

All teachers have used computers in their teaching with different frequency of usage. However, only 2.8% of them are using certain applications or programs in regular basis.

All of the teachers are using computer for teachers' administration papers; e.g. lesson plan, class journal, etc. but a lot of them are only using computer in teaching for power point presentations and video playing.

Initial Data Collection

1. Initial Meeting with the head of Kairos Gracia School Foundation, Mrs. Boen Kim Fung, S.Pd. - 4th March 2018

2. Kairos Gracia School Management Meeting - 6th March 2018

3. Follow up meeting with Kairos Gracia School Management Team - 9th March 2018

4. With the Management Team: (from left)

Imelda Natalia, S.Si - Christiana B. R. Ng, S.Pd. - Yuniarti Dwi Hastuti, S.S.T. - Erna Purwaningsih, S.E. - Gloria B. Placating, B.S. Ed.

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Each of the respondent of the survey has their own reasons of not using certain applications or programs in their classroom teaching.

Some of them are:

Lack of knowledge that can be curbed by more training in technology
Limitation in facilities & resources
Distractions of irrelevant websites or social media
Low internet connection

11 out of 37 teachers joining the survey stated that lack of knowledge in technology hinders them in integrating technology in class. 8 of them are saying that low internet connection has become a problem in using technology in classroom teaching. 3 of them are saying that limitation of preparation time is the obstacle they face in this matter. The rest of them are having different other reasons.

From this survey, I found that in order to integrate technology in classroom teaching, we need to equip teachers with adequate knowledge about technology usage, introduce some applications or programs for them to use and provide necessary facilities needed. At the same time, we need to embrace teachers to make time for themselves to learn and keep up with technology enhancement.

Implementation of Intervention

First thing first, the school board purchased a number of iPads for teachers and students to use in early March. Then, we held trainings for teachers.

Introductory training was done on 16th March 2018. This training was discussing about several features in the iPad that we can use for teaching such as pages, numbers, keynote, itune-u and classroom apps. Although the target of transformation was in Primary level teachers, we also invited teachers from other levels to register for the training if they are interested to it. 43 teachers registered. They are Kindergarten teachers, Primary Teachers, Secondary and Junior College teachers and a staff.

Teachers seems to be engaged and enthusiastic in joining the training. Upon listening to the explanation from story-i trainer - our iPad provider- they had a chance to have a little practice with the apps explained.

Teachers Training with Mr. Chiko & Mr. Arya from story-i

The next training session was conducted on 26th March 2018 at the school premise. Again, by the help of story-i personel, we managed to invite a technology practitioner who is also a teacher in one of private schools in South Jakarta, Ms. Pima Aditya, to conduct the training session. Due to the limit number of teachers required by her, we decided to exclude Kindergarten teachers and staffs for this session and ask Primary Teachers, Secondary and Junior College teachers to re-register for it.

Yet, since some of them were having other responsibilities at church and the school co-curricular activities, we only managed to gather 22 participants - 7 of Secondary and Junior College teachers; 13 of Primary teachers and 2 from the school management.

In the training, Ms. Pima delivered a topic of "Engaging Learning with iPad", she explained about experiential learning, introduced several educational apps, -e.g. pallet, QR Code, trello- digital citizenship and SAMR theory of learning. Teachers are awed by her expertise in technology at the same time inspired through it.

At the end of the session the participants were questioned if they would like to have the follow up training sessions and they all agreed to do so. Nevertheless, the School Management team decided to postpone the next training for the time being, as teachers are extremely busy for the ongoing exams, and let it be applied in the classroom first before the next training will be held.

So, pallet link for teachers is created to keep track on the learning process.

https://padlet.com/vency_the/tpduq1i2zuho

Teachers Workshop

In order to keep the teachers on the track of transformation, an internal workshop was done on 18 April 2018. The goal of the workshop is to make sure that teachers are ,again, aware of our serious attempt on infusing technology in the classroom teaching, informing them another site that they can use for teaching - socrative - and at the same time encouraging them to recall what they have learnt in the previous sessions of trainings. Secondary and Junior College teachers were not involved in the workshop as most of them are in charged in the national and school exams. Only selected primary teachers from different subject groups were requested to participate in the workshop.

Considering the tight schedule and deadlines that teachers are having due to the students' examinations, the workshop was only done for an hour. We basically discussed the application of socrative site in classroom usage, how to sign up, create questions and observe students' work progress. Then we recall the use of classroom apps that we have learnt earlier to monitor students' iPad usage. Workshop activity can be observed in the aforementioned padlet.

Teachers are giving positive feedback about it and would like to use it in their teaching. However, since we have irregular classes within these coming view weeks - due to series of parents day celebrations in school, examination week and holidays in between- they will not be able to apply it in class for the time being. Instead, the try out of the program will be done after the school examinations which will fall in the end of May or early June..

The Tipping point

Although the initial effort of TAP implementation - data collection and teachers trainings - are done, the impact is not significantly shown yet. Teachers are trained but they have no time to either practice nor apply it in their classroom teaching. It doesn't mean that they are not into this transformation attempt but it is more on busy and extremely tight schedule they have.

I was quite devastated overseeing the school schedule, not being able to find even just a day or two for the actual implementation of this project in any of the class regardless their level of studies. Teachers seems to either drowning their head behind the computers, doing some paper works, or busy teaching in class, catching up with the unfinished materials before the examination come. Even when we were talking about some school stuffs, their minds seems to wonder elsewhere, most probably thinking of their workload and deadlines. Meanwhile, I tried to stay down and keep the communication going with the teachers, offering as much help as I can to assist them in any way. Hoping that my being around will be a reminder for the promises and commitment they made about this project implementation. Once in a while I would utter that the iPads are ready to be used anytime and I offered my assistance in their class whenever they wanted to use them.

Waiting silently, praying for the right time to immerse, I finally had a tiny opening to continue working on this project. One of the primary teachers - Religious Education teacher for P3 - Ms. Esther, came to approach and planned to try using 'socratives' while reviewing her lessons. She was saying that she would like to try it then for her to be able to use it more regularly in the future, before she forgot it all. Although it started with only one person, I would consider that as the tipping point of the project. It was the time that a teacher is going to apply this project on her on will, without me forcing them or scheduling it for them.

Finally,The Transformation Attempt!

First classroom attempt - the RE class, was fine until the teacher accidentally deleted the students' progress report in the site. Ms Esther, the RE teacher, had prepared some questionnaires using socratives before class, intending for students to read and review the lessons they have learnt. Students are grouped in three or four and they are supposed to work together searching and finding verses in the bible related to the questions given.

For a short while, all students are engaged to the activity, exited in using the new tool. Yet, due to the limited iPads provided, few students are loosing their focus and withdraw themselves from being deeply involved in the activity until they got to hold the iPad.

While the students are working, the teacher is monitoring them via both classroom app and the actual classroom approach. Things went well, and the class was dismissed. Unfortunately, when Ms Esther was trying to re-open the students's progress report, she accidentally press delete button and there goes all the files. she looses all the students response and not being able to review and check for herself. Students on the other hand, are of course not aware of what was happening to their work.

This incident however, give the teacher a lesson to learn. She now understand that she needs to take some time to read the pop up notification more carefully and meticulously before finally take further action.

Upon seeing us, the RE teacher and myself, around the primary school with some iPads, other teacher approached, a Mathematic teacher, telling us that she would also like to try it out in her class a few days after. So, we did arrange and prepare for it. This time, we made sure that similar accident in RE class won't happen again. More iPads are used to accommodate at least one to two, one iPad for two students. As a result, of course, is better engagement to the lesson. At this point not only teachers are learning, students are also learning some tricks. Some of the students are logging out and redo the exercise, trying to get perfect score for it. The teacher, Ms. Lia, on the other hand monitor and detect the effort through the report in socratives teacher.

The use of technology is slowly immersing in classroom teaching. One more teacher, a Primary English Teacher is correspondingly did the same activity in her class. She managed to collaborate with the previous teacher, the RE teacher, in implementing 'socratives' in her class.

At this point, the teacher is trying to use iPads in group work and individual work. Both are showing that the students are mostly well engaged in the activities. However, those who are using iPad on one to one basis are better evaluated and the learning evaluation is more to individual original result.

As the goal of the project is more into keeping up with technology enhancement in classroom teaching, the students's learning result is temporarily unevaluated.

While the transformation is still gradually processing, I found that three other teachers are working silently toward the same direction. One Primary teacher was showing his effort in upgrading himself, searching and learning new apps to be used - HP Reveal, as shown in the video attached.

Other teacher, a Biology teacher for Junior College, is starting to enjoy google classroom apps in her class (as uploaded in the afore pallet link) and another Secondary School Science Teacher was reporting that he is currently learning and working on class craft application to be applied in his class in the next academic year.

Overseeing the whole process of transformation in my school context, I would not consider this as a successful transformation yet. It maybe a starting point toward transformation which hopefully will be continuously progressing and contribute a better outcome.