ISTE Lori Guerrero - Collaborator

Collaborator

Coaches establish productive relationships with educators to improve instructional practice and learning outcomes

3a. Coaches pursue professional learning that deepens expertise in the ISTE Standards to serve as a model for educators and leaders.

3b. Coaches partner with educators to identify digital learning content that is culturally relevant, developmentally appropriate and considers student interests and aspirations.

3c. Coaches partner with educators to evaluate the efficacy of digital learning content and tools to inform procurement decisions and adoption.

3d. Coaches personalize support for educators by planning and modeling the effective use of technology to improve student learning.

Evidence of Competency

Technology Professional Development Plan

Artifact One: iMakers PD Course and Technology Professional Development Plan

AI Disclosure: I used AI to create the templates for all the artifact images for slideshows, poems, and sight words.

Indicators

3a Cultivate Coaching Relationships

Coaches establish trusting and respectful coaching relationships that encourage educators to explore new instructional strategies.

3d Personalize Support for Educators

Coaches personalize support for educators by planning and modeling the effective use of technology to improve student learning.

Description

The purpose of this Technology Professional Development Plan is to provide my colleagues and parents in the homeschool community with guidance on improving student literacy through digital technology tools. I am designing a year-long plan on how to use AI and other annotation tools to teach Language Arts for 4th through 6th-grade parents or teachers who may need technology to support and improve student learning (3d) and make meaningful connections with phonics, sight words, multisyllabic breakdowns, and writing. This plan includes a year-long coaching relationship where teachers and parents can build self-efficacy through shared experiences with new technology (3a).

Implementation

Because this plan is currently under construction, I have not implemented it in the professional development format. However, I have implemented these technology techniques during my professional practice with my students. Here are a few examples of how I used AI to personalize instruction for students who had a hard time remembering how to read non-phonetic word patterns. I used AI technology to improve student fluency by helping them create a word that they could remember because they hold special meaning for them (3d).

Here, I would like to indicate some of the research behind my Technology Professional Development Plan and why I chose these tools. Homeschooling is a growing field of research; therefore, data is limited regarding its digital technology use. However, I located an article by Morris and Pannone (2024) that states, "...our findings imply that there can be difficulties implementing technology in the classroom and home, particularly with regard to younger learners” (p. 45). Therefore, my goal is to coach parents and homeschool teachers on overcoming these difficulties (3a). I have developed approaches and activities to bridge the gap for parents seeking easy-to-implement tools to help their young students learn to read and make reading sight words accessible with AI (3d).

Reference

Morris, T. H., & Pannone, S. J. (2024). Homeschooling in a digital age: How digital technologies can help children foster a love for (self-directed) lifelong learning. International Review of Education, 70(1), 29–50. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11159-023-10041-x

Impact

This Technology Professional Development Plan is still under development; therefore, I am working towards competence in coaching relationships that explore new instructional strategies (3a). However, I can testify to the impact coaching using these tools has had on the colleagues I have shared with so far. First, my students have increased in their fluency because I found a way to help them remember sight words by creating personal meaning. Parents are starting to experiment more and create their own AI images to represent concepts that their children might struggle with.

Here are some examples of AI-generated poems I made to help them with rhyming and phonics.

Over the past two years, I have volunteered with a third-grade teacher at McKibben Elementary School in Whittier. I have shared many of the tools I will be using in my Technology Professional Development Plan with her classroom. I can see the impact of these tools on her students regarding their engagement, attention span, and work. We have observed that the behavior of the class and the overall mood improve when I come in because I am a novel concept to them. Not only am I novel, but the technology I bring into the classroom is new and exciting.

The students were able to identify the rhymes in these poems and began making up their own patterns (3d).

The third-grade teacher and I have a reciprocal coaching relationship. I share with her all the technology tools I learned during my Master’s in Educational Technology at CSUF, and she shares with me what she is learning through her district and highlights from her Master’s in Reading program, also at CSUF (3a).

Jayce's 3D Prints

Artifact Two: Jayce’s 3 D Prints: A Student’s First Entrepreneurial Journey

AI was used to create the templates for the slideshows.

Indicators

3a Cultivate Coaching Relationships

Coaches establish trusting and respectful coaching relationships that encourage educators to explore new instructional strategies.

3b Identify Relevant Learning Content With Educators

Coaches partner with educators to identify digital learning content that is culturally relevant, developmentally appropriate, and considers student interests and aspirations.

Description

This artifact is a Google Slides presentation created by a fifth-grade homeschool student about his journey in becoming a 3D printing entrepreneur. I currently work online with homeschooling families who have unique opportunities to focus on their child’s interests and aspirations (3b).

Implementation

One way we can meet each learner’s needs is to coach parents to identify digital learning content culturally relevant to their family and community (3b). I use Jayce’s slideshow to help educators and parents identify (3b) how homeschoolers can turn their interests into learning opportunities and even home businesses. After viewing this slideshow, parents can assess the opportunities available to their family.

For example, one student I teach struggles with writing. He has little writing when prompted because he lacks experiences to share from outside of academics. I suggested to his mother that they start by reading their local newspaper to learn about events that may spark an interest (3a). Participating in interest-based learning can help students make choices relevant and meaningful to them (3b). It is difficult to write academic essays that require persuasion or opinion if you haven’t developed any. This family is currently investigating events or activities available in their area that may spark the student’s interest. Hopefully, this student will find his passion as Jacyce did with his 3-D Printing experience.

Impact

Another student I work with is behind in her writing skills. I mostly model writing for her using a document camera while she copies my letter formation in real time on Zoom. I had a hard time getting her to open up about her interests so that she could start writing about what is on her mind. After coaching her father with the artifact above, Jayce’s 3D Prints slideshow, her father informed me that she is interested in animals that can be pets. I coached the parent on how to create a Google Slideshow and how to use AI prompts to create unique slides for the different pets his daughter is interested in (3a,3b).

After learning how to fill in the slides with her ideas using AI, the student engaged with content relevant to her (3b); she shared her knowledge of pets. Surprisingly, she had quite a bit to write about, which motivated her to take risks with spelling and grammar. Due to the nature of Google Slides, she used short phrases. This made learning accessible to her needs because she has always felt inadequate about meeting expectations requiring long essays. I no longer teach this student, but her father (my colleague) can transfer what he learned about Google Slides presentations to other interests that his daughter has throughout her education (3a, 3b).

Reflection

I am developing my expertise in coaching relationships in Indicator 3a with my Technology Professional Development Plan. Although I have not met this indicator, I have practiced many of the tools I will be presenting, such as creating sight words and poems with generative AI to improve student learning (3d).

One of my strongest skills in the ISTE Coaching Standards is Identify Relevant Learning Content With Educators (3b). I demonstrated this skill with how I coached my students’ parents to allow Google Slides presentations to count as relevant learning experiences. Homeschooling families have the unique opportunity to consider student interests and aspirations when planning their lessons. This requires getting to know students on a deeper level. Finding out what they are knowledgeable about can take more than one year. On average, I coach parents for more than two years with multiple students from the same family. We no longer need to memorize endless amounts of information. By graduation, parents and teachers should know what their students' natural talents bend toward. This will require skilled coaches who can help teachers and parents develop the natural skills and interests of their students.

Although I do not have artifacts at this time, I would like to share where I am with indicator 3c, which is about evaluating effective tools for learning. Last year, one of my 9th-grade students was forced to participate in an online English program above his ability. Before the decision to switch my student to an online course, there was no discussion with me about the efficacy of the new digital learning content (3c). He struggled all year to complete assignments without my personalized support to meet his individual needs. By the end of the school year, he was failing, and his teacher reached out to me. We discussed why he was not completing the assignments, and I coached his teacher on the effective use of technology to improve student learning (3d).

I could see right away that he was relying on spell check and AI to write for him. Since he was completing assignments with AI, his spelling, letter formation, grammar, and decoding skills declined. After a coaching session with his teacher about the lack of effectiveness of this online tool, we designed a learning strategy to help him improve his skills at his level (3d).

Although online courses can be cost-effective and efficient, they need to be used responsibly (3c). A human teacher is necessary to recognize when a student submits assignments beyond their ability and is forced to cheat to pass. I have unique insight into this student’s ability because I have been working with him on and off over the last four years. I have implemented almost every element of my Technology Professional Development Plan with this particular student to help meet his individual needs (3c). Hopefully, the attendees of my TPDP will also see an immediate impact on the quality of student work and the fluency they display in their reading. I predict that the most impactful lesson in my TPDP will be the Morphology Breakdown method using AI as a teacher's aid because when students can see individual parts in a multisyllabic word, they have more access to complex texts (3c).

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