What's an Education Transformation Manager?
That's probably the third most-asked question I get (after "Who are you?" and "How did you get in here?").
The short answer is that I'm a member of SLT (the Senior Leadership Team), primarily responsible for steering the direction and development of technology within the school to aid Teaching and Learning.
In practice, that covers many, many roles.
Some of the things I do:
- Keep an eye out for new developments or tools in education, trial them and (where appropriate) put together and carry out a plan for getting it put into effect. This often involves trial groups, one-on-one training sessions with staff, small group training sessions or even sessions to the whole teaching staff at once. The most recent was training everyone in Zoom and Google Classroom in record time for Remote Learning!
- Put together training materials and guides for teachers and students. I've built an entire knowledgebase, which I am currently trialling moving to a Blogger format and expanding it from just IT tips/techniques/guides to include teaching and learning tips from the staff themselves.
- Build, maintain and develop the school website. This is built in Wordpress, with lots of custom CSS, JS, PHP and even some plugins I've written to carry out certain tasks. It's also got some cool features like an automatically updated graph of House Points (which I'll go into in a future post).
- Run the Social Media accounts. I set these up a few years ago and they have been a massive success - we have a Facebook page and private Parents Group, an Instagram and a Twitter account. As well as posting informative and fun things, it's also a key communication tool for a lot of parents and I've established a good rapport with many of them, which helps difuse any potentially negative situations that might arise.
- Co-teach GCSE Computer Science. This is something I greatly enjoy - although I realise I take all the fun parts of teaching with this one - the poor teacher I work with has to do all the real work, like lesson plans and marking. I just turn up and talk about the topics we're covering, bringing in as many real-world experiences as I can to help the students relate to the material and see its relevance.
- Assist in the classroom - you never know what it could be! Help with their website in Dreamweaver? Want to know how to do something in Photoshop? Issues with the 3D printer? It could be almost anything, which is half the fun and challenge!
- Coding! Whilst I studied Java (and a little C) at University and Visual Basic before that, it was after I taught myself Python (in order to be able to teach the students!) that I began using it in earnest in my job. Over the years, I have coded many programs which make my life (and that of the admin teams) much easier. I will share some of these in future posts - I'm really proud of most of them! I've also been coding some fun personal projects, like my sarcastic Discord chatbot, Lobos!
- The big one - Google! When I started at the school in the distant days of 2012, students had Google Apps for Education (as it was called at the time) accounts for email... and that was it.
- About five/six years ago I convinced the higher-ups to invest in a trolley of 30 Chromebooks and started on a campaign of showing everyone the ease and wonders of Google Docs and Drive.
A year later, that expanded to four trollies and over a hundred Chromebooks. - Now, thanks to a new leasing scheme we rolled out, we are almost 1-1 with Chromebooks and students! About 80%-90% of our students own their own now and virtually every classroom has a bank of at least 10 for any students without.
- Following on from that, I have made it my mission to try and get the school to the coveted status of a Google Reference School! Part of that means training myself and the teachers to become Google Certified Educators. I plan to share our journey on this road on this blog too.
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