Teachers need personal support to change their teaching and learning practices through technology. Formal and informal roles such as “champions” (Hargreaves, 2003), “coaches” (Fishman and Davis, 2006), and “technementors” (Ito, 2010) may facilitate collaborative teacher learning of educational technologies. (David and Nancy, 2015)

 

When it comes to working on campus (Marwa, 2018) discussed different approaches related to supporting different teachers when it comes to the STEM field and hands-on activities.

 

IdeasGym for ten years have been working on providing “Educational Technologist as a Service”. The service emerged by receiving teachers’ requests asking for an educational technologist to handle a certain activity related to STEM fields. In those cases IdeasGym is playing various roles; The instructional designer role, the technology coaching role, the co-teacher role and the technementor. IdeasGym's main job in those cases is to fill the gap between what the teachers lack, the pedagogical framework and the appropriate technology service or tool. The Educational Technologist as Service has served schools following the UK, IB,US and Egyptian Curriculum inside Egypt. Moreover, the same service has been tested in Finland in 2018.

Since 2019 IdeasGym is running several trials to test the “Educational Technologist as a Service” Remotely. A very successful trial has been tested in Estonia. In that trial the teacher and students were on Campus while the IdeasGym Edu-technologist was giving remote co-teaching during a Robotics classroom. The virtual “Educational Technologist as a Service” has been developing since then.

By COVID-19 arrival, it is now clear that the majority of schools, teachers and systems are not prepared to play the curriculum expert role and the educational technologist role. Hence, the importance of having “Educational Technologist as a Service” to support teachers in distant learning is increasing.

What do we provide?

We have a variety of educational approaches using technology to support different pedagogical frameworks. Instead of hiring an educational technologist to support each teacher, or hiring one educational technologist per school who at the current COVID case wouldn’t be able to handle all teachers and students. IdeasGym just jumps in the gaps where teachers need help with technology the most. Either on getting advice on selecting the best tool in a remote classroom, instructional design of a certain topic, or how to teach an interactive classroom using technology or on Campus.