Building Teacher Capacity
How can we teach digital literacy and 21st Century skills if we don’t have the skills ourselves?
It’s one thing to purchase the equipment you need like:
- ICT infrastructure
- Learning networks
- Content and educational programmes
- Support programmes
It’s another thing to get the most out of these investments.
Any piece of ICT is only as good as the person implementing it.
Make the most of your school’s ICT investment and build your human capacity. Learn how to use ICT to enhance teaching practices and enable students to get more active in their own learning.
Prepare your students for the 21st Century by preparing yourself!
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Latest posts
Building Teacher Capacity ICT and students non-digitized work As a teacher of English I believe it is important to deal with students original work.My desire is to see students sharing their original writings in their own original hand writings.ICT has assisted me a lot in doing this in an easy and effective way.What I need is just a laptop,a projector and a hover cam.For example,students can write a short descriptive paragraph in their exercise books.Using a hover cam, the writings can be projected and shared during the lesson. ...
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Building Teacher Capacity Flipping our classroom with 21st century learning activities For most teachers in a traditional classroom environment, when students come to class the first thing they do is get introduced to a new content. And then, the second half of class we reinforce that concept to help the students master it. This typically takes place through a variety of extension activities. We have small group, or projects, papers, and even worksheets and problem sets. And then, to help reinforce the content, we send homework home with the student. One the other hand, in a flip ...
Building Teacher Capacity Training of ICT Teachers for the 21st Century Skills Development After long months of waiting, finally, I started my training in the Division of Leyte, Philippines. Now, I am doing my commitment to Microsoft in Education and that is to train teachers to become innovative, simply, through the integration of technology in education. At first, I thought it would be difficult to train 400 teachers. That is really my apprehension, because Leyte was one of the provinces in the Eastern Visayas Region, Philippines, which was totally damaged by the super typhoon ...
Building Teacher Capacity Virtual collaboration between Regions is an opportunity to learn from each others Recently I collaborated with MIE Experts 2015 in Pakistan and facilitated training session for educators on 21CLD on collaboration Strand. This collaboration has led to learning from each others' diverse experiences and learning conditions/environments. You may try the same....
Building Teacher Capacity "Teachers First, Collaboration is Key" toward effective 21CLD Imagine and picture this: Imagine in every schools that every teaching staff are passionate to improve their teaching instruction through collaboration between teachers in their school but also given permission to collaborate with other teachers from other schools. It’s not something that should be force, but it is something that schools’ society naturally do - rather hesitate to do collaboration as to see other teachers as competition. I believe these sort of collaboration will gives a lot ...
Building Teacher Capacity 10x10 #8 Planning is essential. Plans change. Whether you are thinking about an indiviual lesson or a series of lessons, a single student or a group of learners. If you are a school leader thinking about the strategic future of your organisation or if you're a policy maker considering the future of your system, planning is the most important thing you can do. However, having a plan and then following it religiously even when it isn't working is the worst thing you can do. I get shown 'plans' all the time -from teachers right through to ...
Building Teacher Capacity 10x10 #7 - Business Intelligence is Basic Intelligence Hi everyone, I hope you all had a great holiday (even if you were still at work!) and welcome back to the Building Capacity Hot Topic. Have you missed me?!! Lets continue the series on the 10 things I've learned about learning. Successful businesses gather, analyse and use data every day. It helps inform strategy, it indicates opportunities for celebration or intervention, it helps keep stakeholders informed and engaged and it is now so much easier to do because of technology. Using Excel to ...
Building Teacher Capacity 10x10 #6 - Collaboration is the most important ingredient To ensure systemic, scalable and sustainable sucess and improvement, collaboration is essential. By collaboration I don't just mean working together, but higher order collaborative skills like shared responsibility, substantive decision making, and interdependence. Throughout our work at Imagine Education over the last 10 years, in over 60 countries every single successful project has had good cross sector collaboration and every project that doesn't has failed to scale or move beyond a pilot. ...
Building Teacher Capacity 10x10 #5 - Simplify the Learning Process It doesn't matter how old you are, what your starting point is, what the content is or what the assessment objectives are, learning is a process. If you can clarify that process for people, help them see the importance of each phase, then it becomes manageable, transferable and hopefully even enjoyable. The best simplification of the learning process I've seen or heard so far comes from Simon Breakspear and it goes like this: collect, order, connect, embed, apply. Learning happens best when ...
Building Teacher Capacity ABOUT OUR SCHOOL- WESTLANDS Westlands Primary school is a Kenyan public primary school that lies about three kilometers west of the Central Business District of the capital city of Kenya- Nairobi. It is a modern school with permanent buildings, goood infrastructure modern learnoing facilities such as computers. it is a triple streamed school with about 1500 pupils and 40 teachers. It also enjoys a support staff of twenty three workers. It is a good working environment where excellence thrives. Westlands school is one of the...
Building Teacher Capacity Understanding teachers’ entry behavior is key to a successful teachers ICT proficiency development skills Having trained teachers in both urban and rural areas, I have come to discover that there is a great need to understand the teachers’ entry behavior before allowing the teachers to have hands on experience with the computer. Otherwise, it will be hard for the facilitator to enjoy the training and meet the teachers’ expectations at the end of the training. During the introduction phase (small group discussion), I always found it important for teachers to define ICT, identify ICT tools and share ...
Building Teacher Capacity 10x10 #4 - Finding the Key Every student has a lock and a good teacher finds the key for each one. It's why learning has to be authentic, relevant and personalised. Otherwise what's the point? How can you justify a young person spending hours of their lives learning something that we deemed relevant generations ago. As Sugata Mitra said it's no good teaching sword fighting and horse riding in school today as those skills are no longer needed in today's world. We need to teach problem solving (or better still problem ...
Building Teacher Capacity you can do it Our first goal is to open fields, and integrate with the world-wide learning to convert the school to a global one. Teachers and students are encouraged to accept new ideas and participate in an educational festival every day. We look forward to using new methods that are not yet practiced . Support students' talents : The process of teaching and education is not only in the classroom. The other side is to help the students' within themselves. Their own interests, talents and what they are ...
Building Teacher Capacity BE A TEACHER: A CONSTANT QUESTION We are now finishing the course academic in Spain, many of my colleagues and myself, we ask ourselves what will learn our students of activities that propose, even if the shape that we have proposed them activities, with the methodology, the "mysterious" how, was the most suitable.** The simplest answer is to ask her own students as simple questions: what activity is most like you?, which activity has developed, or enhanced your skills?, what all the activities you has excited more?. The ...
Building Teacher Capacity Effective teaching-learning Process: National and International Practices What is effective teaching ?: Teaching is effective when a learner gets maximum benefit from it and use the learning for the benefit of himself and for the community. It depends on who are teaching and whom. Teachers, Students, Administrators, Environment and Resources. Effective teaching produces effective learners. Effective learners become the useful citizen of the country.Everyone has the Right to Learn, to education, to use technology. Need to empower more the use of technology in the ...
Building Teacher Capacity 10x10 #3 - Marginal Gains in 2003, Dave Brailsford became the Performance Director of the Great Britain Cycling team. In 2004 they had their best Olympic medal haul since 1908. The Olympics in 2008 and 2012 were even better. Why? His simple philosophy on improving performance which he called 'marginal gains' – examine everything that might have an effect on performance and improve each by just 1%. Each improvement may seem trivial, but the cumulative effect can be huge. If we apply the same rule to our learning (and ...
Building Teacher Capacity 10x10 #2 - Plotting the Path Together I've found that another key to successful learning is ownership. A student needs to know where they are, know where they want to go, and know how to get there. By agreeing goals and plotting steps to reach it with their teachers or peers, progress is owned by the student and they can really value their growth. Giving students control of their own learning destiny can also bring about surprising and brilliant experiences for you and them which you could not predict. It's a shame that the ...
Building Teacher Capacity Enlighten the School with ICT Sri Lanka is a small country in the Indian Ocean called as “The pearl in Indian Ocean” with 20 million great people. Our country is a wonder of Asia ecologically-wondrous types of forests, imposing mountains, magnificent landscapes featuring lazy lagoons, fertile wetlands, inspiring heritage sites from ancient cities to colonial forts, a vibrant culture including fine arts and crafts and grand festivals, and people of diverse ethnicity and religious persuasion, charming and hospitable. My ...
Building Teacher Capacity Urban Planning & Building Resiliency at Sewickley Academy On May 6, ’s Grade 9 social studies classes took place in the city of Pittsburgh. Lesson plans included Pittsburgh’s Comprehensive Five-Year Plan at PlanPGH, sustainable technology at Phipps Conservatory’s new Center for Sustainable Landscapes, second-hand interviews with Afghan refugees recorded by Conflict Kitchen, and a Tesla Coil. Thanks to the support of Sewickley Academy’s parent association, Grade 9 Human Geography students participated in an “Amazing Race” experience, where teams of ...
Building Teacher Capacity “Whenever I step into my school, I feel Home!” I have been a teacher for 18 years now; planning, teaching, evaluating and following students’ performance, improving my teaching techniques, adopting new strategies in class, training teachers and working on my own professional development, and really enjoying every single thing about all of this! Ever since I was a child, I noticed that the quality of education in private schools differs a lot from that in the public schools in Lebanon. Private sectors gave a special attention to their ...
Building Teacher Capacity Teachers have to model creative role in their classroom to engage and motivate their students What creativity means to you and how digital tools support development of innovative teaching and learning practices? ...
Building Teacher Capacity Profile from my own perspective My loving country Kenya has a population of approximately 40 million people.Most of these live in the rural areas though the major urban areas are very densely populated.The capital City of Kenya is Nairobi and other major cities include the tourist destination of Mombasa,Kisumu which hosts the second largest fresh water lake in the world -Lake Victoria ,the agricultural town of Nakuru and the ever rising Eldoret which is the home to the famous world beaters in athletics.In deed,Kenya is a land ...
Building Teacher Capacity 10x10 #1 - The 3 Fs Hi, sorry a little later than advertised but here's my first post in the 10x10 series. The 3 Fs - feedback, feedback, feedback. Nothing inspires learners more than feedback. Not just a grade or even a 'well done' but proper, constructive, formative feedback. This can be from an adult or from a peer - both are equally valuable. I can not stress enough the importance of this simple process that many of us leave to one side day after day in the classroom. It can be verbal or written, it doesn't ...
Building Teacher Capacity Educated Differently How many content can we teach about some specific area? Will our students be specialist about ancient Egypt, World War II or about anatomy, for example? This morning I have been talking with some teachers about this and nobody agreed about which is the most important part of the history that need to be taught in the school. I am not talking about forgetting the contents; they are very useful, but as well as technology, they cannot be the goal of the learning process. It may sound a bit harder,...
Building Teacher Capacity Give this to your IT department: Five Ways IT can help teachers be more effective. Let me start this post by stating that I am not a teacher. I am also not a geek in the traditional sense of the word. Now that I’ve discredited myself with both of the intended audiences of this post, let me explain why I might be qualified to give some advice in this area. In my career I have worked to help organizations either start something big, or make big changes in how they do things. In the last 15 years, I have worked almost exclusively with educational institutions both as a ...
Building Teacher Capacity How a tablet can make you a more effective teacher - really informative webinar! There are so many ways tablets can help you in your classroom. We will present practice tips and tricks that highlight tablets and their uses in the classroom. This webinar walks through the use of Office Mix, Onenote, PowerPoint and other key resources ...
Building Teacher Capacity Tech Talks: Building Capacity through Online Training For the past two years, I have led our district in providing Tech Talks for teachers and staff. These one-hour professional development sessions focus on one piece of a technology tool, allow for immediate application in the classroom, and are delivered via Microsoft Lync. A Tech Talk might show teachers how to share notebooks in OneNote, or better organize a classroom website, or manage students’ devices remotely. It might review best practices for using brainstorming software or how to get ...
Building Teacher Capacity Hamiota Schools: Small, but Good! I’m very fortunate to work at a great school with a talented staff and very supportive surrounding communities. is a small, rural school in Manitoba, Canada. Our 126 Kindergarten to Grade 5 students come together from several small communities, with many of them riding the bus to school each day. There’s a lot to like about Hamiota Schools, but here’s a few things that make them special to me: Community Support: The communities surrounding our schools give us wonderful support. Parents, ...
Building Teacher Capacity 10x10 - 10 things I've learnt about Learning in the last 10 years Hi, I'm very pleased to say that my company, Imagine Education, is 10 years old in July this year. I'm going to celebrate this by posting the 10 things I've learnt about learning over the last 10 years (and over 60 countries!) the 10 posts will start next week and be 1 per week. Please contribute your own (even a Top 3 will do!) My first post will be about the 3Fs............on Monday!...
Building Teacher Capacity Our Road to Change Our Road to change Our school is one of the oldest schools in Hong Kong. Our school started at 1951. The school building is nearly 60 years old. We have a deep traditional culture and values. How can this “60 years old school” can have a big change within 3 years to become one of the innovative school in Hong Kong. The key is the ICT. We built up the “Salesian Cloud”, this initiate a big change. What changes? Let see our story. The “Salesian Cloud” In 2009, our education department ...
Building Teacher Capacity What it is to teach in Austria. OR: Teaching at the HAK Steyr is my passion Education in Austria Education in Austria is free for all children who begin with four years in primary School at the age of six, followed by another eight years at a vocational institution which prepares them for university or collage. There are three types of schools in Austria- state schools, private and private schools run by the church. Children are taught, reading, writing, arithmetic and how to search and process information, especially now with the use of technology in classrooms. In ...
Building Teacher Capacity Silent Heroes in Education. My country, Sri Lanka, is a small, beautiful island, that has an exciting, vibrant, diverse culture with a population of 20 million, 2.2 of which live in the capital Colombo. Our official languages are both: Sinhala and Tamil. There are idyllic beaches with spectacular coral reefs, and world-class surfing. The country’s impressive array of castles, temples, and ruined ancient cities that date back to 500BC, provides endless exploration for culture enthusiasts. In the midst of all of this...
Building Teacher Capacity Teacher Appreciation Month HI, May is teacher appreciation month in the US and Microsoft are running a webinar series to celebrate all the great stories out there of teachers and leaders who are making a real difference to children's futures. Sign up for free here: Please also use this blog to share your stories so we can celebrate you too! Thanks...
Building Teacher Capacity Kids Coding in Hong Kong Kids Coding is a new topic in Hong Kong. In Hong Kong, students can learn coding only on secondary school. If they don't take Computer Science for their core subject in higher form, they can only learn coding up to secondary 3. Coding become more and more important all over the world. Coding can increase the competing power of a country as it may be the main industry in the future world. Nearly all the devices or machine need program to drive it. So, I start to make some change in Hong Kong ...
Building Teacher Capacity Be a Microsoft Ambassador for Education It is good to be with people who have the passion for teaching. Aside from being a Microsoft Expert Educator, now I am a Microsoft Ambassador for Education. This is a new program of Microsoft Philippines which aims to help teachers in using technology in teaching. With this, I cannot just train teachers as my commitment to Microsoft in Education Global Community… I can do more… as my advocacy. This is very exciting! Ambassadors need to adopt a school and train teachers with the use of technology. ...
Building Teacher Capacity Managing and developing Digital Citizenship One issue that I get asked about a lot when working with schools or ministries who are embedding technology into learning is about digital citizenship. Sometimes it's called Netiquette, sometimes e-safety. Whatever you call it how do we make sure children are not only safe online but also behave respectfully to others, are aware of copyright, understand cyber bullying, and also know about the health and safety of technology usage? Some useful sites I've discovered include: and What sites and ...
Building Teacher Capacity 21st Century Learning Panel Discussion at Global Forum This week I have the privilege of being in sunny Barcelona with 250 of the worlds’ most innovative educators. I have been inspired by them and amazed by them. Today they are conducting a 24 hour Learnathon which I’ll post more about later. For now I want to write about the Panel Discussion I watched yesterday. As you can see from the post below it was a varied panel with different backgrounds and perspectives. They addressed 4 key questions: What does 21st Century Learning look like? What ...
Building Teacher Capacity 21st Century Skills – Getting Your Students Ready. Mar 12th at 3:30pm, room 116/117 @ the Microsoft Global Forum in Barcelona. To learn more about the forum please use this link How do educators and school leaders prepare themselves, their classrooms, and their school communities for an environment that enables learners to be skilled and ready to meet the demands of our world today? Do these needs differ depending on where you live and/or work? As a leader and educator – what are the key things you should be thinking about and how do you get started? In this panel discussion, questions will be addressed on how to ...
Building Teacher Capacity Teaching Contents VS Teaching Skills Teaching the contents or teaching the skills? Which one would you opt for? I would go for the second one as I see by teaching the skills to get the contents, students will gain and benefit more. It's also the first step to teaching them to be independent learners. In teaching the skills, it must not be done theoretically as it is not meant to be memorized. Skills should be taught through mastery learning, demonstration, hands-on and application methods. It must also be done often so that ...
Building Teacher Capacity 21st Century Skills – Getting Your Students Ready As the 2014 Global Forum in Barcelona approaches, I’d like to talk about the need to prepare our students for the 21st century workplace. As noted in several recent studies (see for example the McKinsey Report – Education to Employment), there is a worryingly global and growing ‘skills gap’ between the abilities of school leavers and graduates and the abilities required to be successful in today’s ever changing workplace environment. How can we as educators and school leaders prepare ourselves, ...
