Monika Dockendorff
Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago
Through this contribution, I will share my experience as a 2-year Consultant on digital transformation for SIP (Sociedad de Instrucción Primaria), a net of 17 schools in Chile.
The consultancy's main objective was to integrate digital technology for teaching and learning in 4 subjects: Language, History, Science, and Mathematics.
This School Net has an organizational structure with 2 "innovation coordinators" per subject, who act as intermediate leaders promoting pedagogical innovation within schools.
During 2023, we developed a “pilot experience” in one of the 17 schools to test the model and further scale it to the rest of the schools in the net. This pilot experience consisted of selecting 2 model teachers of each of the four subjects, and together with the innovation coordinators and the advisors (me and my colleague from the humanities), we discussed the potential pedagogical benefits that technology integration may yield in teaching and learning. After two working sessions, we identified two learning objectives per subject (at different levels) that would be addressed during the second semester and the appropriate digital tools to do so. We planned the technology-enhanced lessons together.
These lessons were implemented by the model teacher and the coordinator together and were also recorded to give evidence-based feedback and to produce material for the escalation.
This presentation will only include the experience with science subjects.
The technology-enhanced science lessons of the pilot experience were:
1. Electric Circuit (5th grade), with the Circuit Construction Kit Phet Simulator
2. Mitosis (10th grade), with Augmented Reality Division Mitotica app
After this successful experience, innovation coordinators, together with the advisors, identified two other learning objectives to add to the former ones and have a set of four technology-enhanced science lessons to scale the project and implement in the 17 schools during 2024:
3. Optics (9th grade), with Geometric Optics Phet Simulator
4. Atomic model (8th grade), with the Build an Atom Phet Simulatorrn
We organized two professional development opportunities with all science teachers involved in the project (levels 5,8,9 and 10). First, we had an online training session to socialize these new technology-enhanced lesson plans. After that, we had an in-person training session to simulate the lesson. All teachers had to play a student role, and one acted as Teacher for about 10 minutes, allowing many of them to take the Teacher role during the session. During this training, lesson plans experienced several changes that they agreed upon.
These lessons are being implemented now in 17 schools in Chile.
In addition to the achievements and challenges teachers faced when implementing these lessons, we have also registered student perceptions of these technology-enhanced learning opportunities, which we would like to share during this presentation.