LIT2T Leadership Guide

34 TO: TABLE OF CONTENTS 5. Learning Communities The LearnIT2teach Project makes use of several types of social media in our effort to support the development of an ESL instructor community for sharing better practices and support. The portal includes a link to the LearnIT2teach Twitter space. The LearnIT2teach YouTube Channel and the Podomatic resource offer community citizens two more ways to participate by responding to media created for the group. Community members can upload and download learning objects and share ideas at Tutela, CIC’s national repository. Tutela encourages discussion in the form of commenting and responding as well as rating learning objects. Communication is also promoted within the LearnIT2teach training and at edulinc.org , using forums, messaging, glossaries and other dedicated items such as calendars. We hope that expanding channels of communication among TESL professionals will support the further growth of an ESL teaching and learning online community of practice. 6. Empowered Leadership During the Stage 1 face-to-face session, instructors demonstrate their aptitude for blended use of technology. After an online consolidation course (pre-stage 2), there are three follow up stages available for instructors wanting to get to higher levels of proficiency with learning technology. Our mentors can provide suggestions for identifying exceptional educational technology instructors from your centre. Additionally, the Learning Technology Innovation Leadership course (LTIL) encourages and enables leadership with learning technology to support local SPO innovation. 7. Appropriate Funding Administrators can use the LearnIT2teach Project (which also includes the courseware at edulinc.org) to demonstrate to funding agencies that sound educational technology is an essential component of the centre’s teaching delivery. 8. Assessing the State of Educational Technology in Your Centre The project’s evaluation methods, Participatory Action Research (PAR) and the Model of Evaluation of Professional Development and Training, are used to determine and articulate the success of our training. As the project evolves and more and more instructors take the training, and more learners gain access to the courseware, we will be looking deeper at the impact on teaching and learning of blended learning courseware. In addition, our future evaluation will target the state of educational technology in the language training centres. These reports can be used as a means of assessing the condition of educational technology at individual centres.