Last year, my colleague and I worked on creating a prototype protocol for the staff in our school to follow when prototyping something new. This was based on the work some of our staff had done with NoTosh.

At first we created a flowchart, in hopes that teachers would be able to make their way through and see what their next steps were. Unfortunately, it was not very user friendly. We then created a Prezi, hoping that the more interactive interface would be more appealing and useful, and would be more accessible for teachers. Again, no one used it. Following the protocol we created, we went back to the drawing board, and created a Google Slides presentation, streamlining the information, adding clickable links to flow through the protocol, and added guiding questions and examples as support. And what do you think happened? No one used it 🙁

So here I am now, taking the next steps by trying the protocol myself. I met with Gerry De Fazio, who is coaching me throughout this journey.

My first step was to name some assumptions about blogging at OJCS.

  • Blogging is a requirement in our school
  • Teachers are blogging regularly in three different ways: communication, homework, thoughts on education
  • Everyone loves blogging
  • People aren’t comfortable with blogging and that’s why they aren’t blogging

Now I needed to interview people to challenge those assumptions. Remembering that there were 2 goals for this project (my own PGP to create a blogging course for teachers, and to model the prototype protocol for staff) I wanted to model the “gathering data” step in a few different ways. I created a Google Form, a Padlet board, a post-it collection board in my class, and I will also be interviewing face-to-face.

I assume that for those teachers who I asked to participate online or by filling out post-its in my classroom, not all will participate. And that’s ok. I hope to see which option would be best to suggest to faculty.

Here’s some data I’ve collected so far:

I will continue to interview next week and update with more results and my analysis.