Reports and Reviews

With its first full-time staff members starting in June 2013, the Doceo Center for Innovation + Learning began its work to improve K-12 teaching and learning in Idaho during the 2013-2014 school year. This report highlights the Center’s efforts for its first academic year of operations, encompassing Fall 2013 and Spring 2014. In this year, the Doceo Center participated in a number of K-12 outreach, research, and university development activities and has produced a number of valuable outcomes focused on improving K-12 teaching and learning in the state of Idaho through effective technology integration.

This report provides an overview of activities and results from the Doceo Center’s first year of operations and is divided into five sections: Background, K-12 Outreach, Research, University Development, and Becoming a National Model.

To understand and support large-scale innovations with technology for K-12 education, it is essential to understand the practices, needs, and interests of K-12 institutions. Web-based information systems are of particular interest, because schools and districts use such systems to support a variety of functions ranging from instruction and classroom management to communications and reporting. Since K-12 institutions may utilize a variety of technologies to meet these needs and systems do not exist to track institutional use of web-systems from year-to-year, this report utilizes web-crawling of K-12 school websites to determine which web systems schools are using and categorizes them in terms of function, cost, and openness.

Results from this study reveal that Idaho K-12 schools utilize a variety of web systems to support local needs. The most prominent systems identified in terms of school adoption include: Google Sites, PowerSchool, Blackboard, Wordpress, SchoolLoop, and Blogspot. Each of these systems is adopted in accordance with either a top-down pattern (i.e. school adoption is led by the district or region) or a bottom-up pattern (i.e. district and regional adoption is led by individual schools). Blogspot is a clear example of bottom-up adoption, while Blackboard is a clear example of top-down adoption.

As a part of the Doceo Center for Innovation + Learning’s goal to improve student learning across the state of Idaho through effective technology integration, the center provides educators opportunities for professional development. As a team of four, we work to research and disperse innovative practices to further this initiative. While the center’s technology integration specialist for K-12 offers these opportunities to teachers and pre-service teachers serving grades K-12, higher education professionals are often overlooked when it comes to pedagogical development. Therefore, the Doceo Center hired a technology integration specialist for the University of Idaho to fill this gap and offer sessions for higher education faculty.

The Doceo Center is just one of many groups across campus that work to improve pedagogy. It is because of this that we must come to understand how we fit into the campus as a whole and not replicate any already existent efforts. By forming connections across campus, such as collaborating with Distance & Extended Education, we can utilize other resources on campus and widen our impact. Forming connections also allows the center to become familiar with individual college or department initiatives and assist with those when applicable. While the Doceo Center is not the only place on campus that innovation takes place, we seek to act as a hub where innovative efforts come together.