BLC18

Our presentation will detail the process of taking a district with 11 schools and over 5,000 students into the Digital Age. The Franklin Public Schools in Massachusetts, had started this journey with a number of early adopters who were engaging in a variety of activities, but without purpose and planned outcomes. The district begin sending 20-40 teachers and administrators to BLC each year, beginning in 2012. During a debriefing pizza lunch at BLC 2014, we decided to form a Digital Learning Committee (DLC) to solidify and actualize our learnings. This committee continues to this day with the presenters, Joyce and Brian, spearheading the effort. Together, we represent the building based and district views of identifying a need and solving problems in the digital learning arena. We determined our mission to be:The Franklin Public Schools Digital Learning Committee will empower all stakeholders to become responsible digital citizens and active learners within a constantly changing digital landscape.
We will specifically address our successes and challenges so that other districts can best decide how to proceed simultaneously on multiple fronts. Some of the successes include: the formation of a Digital Literacy Committee, creating a general awareness of the need for digital learning which has carried over into budget development, the creation of a Bill of Rights, helping to set the direction in the district without having integration specialists as part of our staff, a teacher driven approach to innovation with a growth mindset, and lesson design that now incorporates the interactive and digital components that we had not previously seen in our classrooms. The challenges we faced include the same challenges that come with every initiative: lack of time, money and resources. However, we have worked hard to overcome these challenges and others and will share some of our pitfalls and how other districts may be able to anticipate and learn from our experiences. The truth is that this work is never done and we are now moving towards authentic audiences for students while maintaining their safety, embedding digital literacy in all content areas, and making the digital learning standards of Massachusetts relevant for our teachers. We have come a long way but realize there is still much work to do. Join us for a conversation about digital literacy that will include sharing of documents that the district has created, Q&A, and turn and talk so that attendees will have the opportunity to consider takeaways that will help their own work as they return to their districts and schools.