Technology Integration Workshops at Harper High School

For the past three months I've been experimenting with Wiki spaces, so when I saw that the Conference had a number of workshops I jumped at the opportunity to listen and learn. I attended Charlene's, Will's, and David's presentations, and all included discussion of wikis. I'm not given a lot of PD time by my administration, but last Thursday, I had the entire 2 hours of in-service time for Technology Integration, so I set up workshops (password: harper) that I had hoped would interest the staff. I enlisted the aid of those teachers at Harper who have been using technology in their lessons. I asked them to share their expertise with their colleagues. I ran one of the workshops and focused on wikis. I borrowed from Will Richardson and began with Wikipedia and then had all 8 teachers who signed up for my workshop create a Backpackit account. Some of the teachers who would have taken the workshop were facilitating in other labs in our school, so my group was small. Several wanted to know what they could do with wikis? But a few were fascinated by its simplicity and how it archives all changes. Generally, the feedback that I received was very positive. All the workshops were engaging and gave even novices (we have an embarrassing sizeable number of tech novices) an opportunity to find a level of comfort at the computer. Unfortunately, technology based in-service time is usually no more than 3 hours per school year. My Administration doesn't quite get the correlation between technology and all other aspects of education in the 21st century.