Training Your Staff

Having worked with after school site staff since 2005, SRI and its collaborators have developed an approach to preparing staff to facilitate ICT4me. Critical reading of the curriculum, two 4-hour trainings, and weekly preparation time will help you and your staff prepare to facilitate the ICT4me units. Some of the units will require a bit more training and preparation, such as unit 5, which requires that facilitators feel confident using and helping youth use Stagecast Creator or Scratch software. Feel free to add and adapt the following suggestions to your needs.

Reading

Reading the curriculum may seem like a tedious task; however, it’s the best way to get a sense of units as a whole. We recommend reading the curriculum at least twice before starting the unit: once before the training and again before implementation. The first time should be read to get a sense of the whole and prepare any questions or concerns about the technology, content or process to be answered during the training. During the second read, you can highlight and make notes about how you will implement it.

Four-hour training sessions

Given the amount of content in each unit, we recommend about 1 hour of training for every 5-8 hours of curriculum. That means about 8 hours of training for most units.

'Here’s a sample agenda from a Unit 5 training for weeks 1-5. Notice that there are "hands-on" activities sprinkled throughout the training. This means that the participants are engaged as learners, that is, they are doing the activity as the youth would do the activity. After each hands-on portion, the whole group discussed the big ideas and strategies for how to facilitate that activity with the youth. This model of training has the ICT4me facilitators engaged with the content with a "learner hat," and then analyzing the activity with a "facilitator hat."

 

Example ICT4me Professional Development Agenda for Unit 5 Weeks 1-5

9:00 - 9:05	Introduction
9:05 - 9:15	ICT4me Overview and Introduction to Unit 5 (goals and big ideass)
9:15 - 9:30	Walk through Weeks 1-5 (Reminder: At beginning of each week, check with the youth where in the design process they are.)
9:30 - 10:00	Hands-on (as learners): Stagecast activity
	As facilitators: Discuss big ideas in programming
10:00 - 11:00	Hands-on: Math
	As facilitator: Discuss big ideas in math for Unit 5
11:00 - 11:40	Hands-on Careers
	As facilitators: Discuss Electronic Arts site visit