The Knowledge Loom: The Success Story

Morristown School District (Lamoille South Supervisory Union)

Morrisville, VT

School Type: Public	School Setting: Rural
Level: K-12	School Design: Traditional
Content Presented By:
NEIRTEC, Northeast & Islands Regional Technology in Education Consortium

Design and Implementation

Over the past three years, the Morristown School District’s Information Technology Committee has been working on the development of a curriculum. In so doing, the committee decided to use International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) National Education Technology Standards for Students (NETS) and the American Association of School Librarians’ (AALS) Student Standards as frameworks for developing a set of local standards and benchmarks for all students. In the Morristown School District, all curriculum committees follow the same process while developing and reviewing curricula. An outline of the process follows.

1) Establish a structure and Process The Information Technology Committee is made up of nine teachers (each representing two grade levels), a media specialist, the high school principal, and the information technology director. The committee has met every two to three weeks over the past three years.

2) Curriculum Audit The committee developed two surveys that asked the teachers how students use information technology to enhance their learning while in their class. The first survey was developed based on the ISTE Standards for Students. The survey was open-ended and asked what teachers were doing according to each standard. The information that we gathered was not very reliable, since most teachers did not understand the ISTE standards without any professional development. The second survey was based on the use of hardware, software, and products that students produced in the class. They developed 25 questions and asked teachers to identify whether students used and/or produced items that were on the list in their classes. Teachers were also asked whether they taught the skills and knowledge to use the items or whether the students needed prior knowledge to use the objects. The committee related the items on the list to the six standards and were able to see what the students were doing across the district.

3) Review Research In preparing for the development of the Information Technology Curriculum, the IT Committee reviewed several different documents and research projects. The first thing they looked at was their own past project with Apple computers. They also looked at the work the Milken Family Foundation has done on expanding on the work that Apple started. The main document they used was the research from the "Seven Dimensions of Learning." What helped shape the work was the National Educational Technology Standards from ISTE. Once all the members of the committee understood the standards, they were able to start working on the benchmarks that are aligned with the ISTE and AASL student standards.

4) Expectations and Benchmarks To develop benchmarks and expectations for students in the Morristown School District, the IT committee felt that it needed to expand the number of teachers so they had representation from all the grade levels. In the summer of 2000, the expanded IT committee met for 3 days to work on benchmarks and expectations for all students at each grade level. The members broke up into groups of PreK through 2nd grade, 3rd through 5th grade, 6th through 8th grade and 9th through 12th grade. Each group looked at the ISTE and AASL student standards and asked two questions: what should a student be able to do and know to meet that standard, and what is developmentally appropriate for the students at this grade level? With those questions in mind, they began to write the scope and sequence for the curriculum. Once this work was done, a sub-committee looked at the work. For the past 9 months, they have refined the document to have common categories within each standard. To see the completed matrix of benchmarks and expectations look at http://www.morrisville.org/msd/curriculum/infotech.htm. Click on each standard to see the benchmark.

5) Implementation The 2001 – 2002 school year will be the district's pilot year to start with implementing the integration of the information technology standards and benchmarks into the curriculum to enhance student learning. They plan to have the information technology director, teacher leaders and the integration specialist work with grade-level groups that are the same as the division of benchmarks to develop the learning opportunities for the students. While working on this process, we want to make sure that students have multiple chances to achieve each of the benchmarks. Throughout this next school year, the teachers will teach units that allow students to learn how to use information technology to support their own learning.

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