A few Sundays ago, collaborating with two district instructional technologists--one from Austin ISD, Diane Sidoroff and the other from Richardson ISD, Daniel Baham--I worked to design a professional development session for introducing teachers to Thinkfinity. Admittedly, the PD planning was half-baked (may my partners forgive me) and hastily constructed, for all the attention we lavished upon it in a short hour of planning. However, it was good enough for a 10-15 minute presentation that Daniel and Diane did a wonderful job on.

The Thinkfinity trainer, Karen Horn, introduced us to various scenarios, assigning one to each group. The scenario that we ended up with included this one, labelled Scenario 8:

Audience: You will be presenting to a group of high school teachers from Jefferson High (no, this isn't our Jefferson High...just a generic Jefferson HS), a back-to-basics charter school located in your district. On this staff development day, all 40 teachers had a choice either to go to "Every Teacher is a Reading Teacher" training or your Thinkfinity training. You are assured there will be no more than 20 teachers in your session. The school is very traditional and you are somewhat surprised that they have invited you to present. The school doesn't even have a computer lab.

Time Scheduled for Workshop: 2 hours

Technology Available for Workshop: You will be presenting in one teacher's classroom, which is equipped with 5 student computers, plus an additional computer hooked up to the classroom TV. Most of the classrooms on campus are only equipped with a teacher computer and 1 student computer.

Diane and I spent some time arguing about whether the teachers we served would benefit from a Level of Technology Implementation (LOTI) higher than 2. Here's a Bubbl.us that maps out the conversation (note that you can click on it and move it around to see different parts in the window available):