My Reflections, Week 5

When I heard the title of the course, Instructional Management, I actually did not know that the coursework would be based around technology. I thought it would be on the PDAS system, lesson planning review, and curriculum selection. As I delved into the course I discovered that is was focused on technology and its implementation and expectations on school districts across Texas. I expected to learn a lot about what kinds of technology are available and how administrators play a role in developing and evaluating technology usage on their individual campuses. The course outcomes did align with what I envisioned, however it was also much more. I achieved my goals of learning more about new tools for teaching with technology, which I am happy about because not only will this course help me when I become an administrator, but it will also help me in my current teaching position.

The outcomes that I achieved by learning more about technology implementation and technology standards on Texas campuses will absolutely help me in my current position because I am an administrative intern and a member of my campus's site based decision making committee. I plan to use the information I learned about the STaR chart and long range technology plan to help plan professional development sessions in the next SBDM committee meeting. Part of the actions plan that I developed in this course was to use what I learned to help educate other teachers on my campus about the type of technology evaluations and expectations that we have, and also to consult with member of the SMDM committee and our district technology coordinator on why we as a campus and a district do not include technology as one of the aspects of our Campus Improvement Plan and District Improvement Plan, respectively. I also plan to use the new ideas about technology in the classroom in my role as a regular and pre AP World Geography teacher. I can already envision all the ways I can use technology in a social studies class.

I think I accomplished all of the goals that I set out to accomplish when I entered this course. I learned a lot and feel much more comfortable looking at technology data, which I previously either didn't understand or knew existed! My understanding of a principles role in technology increased greatly, however if there was one thing I feel I could have done better on, or understood more thoroughly, it would be the action plan that I created in week four. I feel like I created the action plan to the best of my ability, but I do not feel totally comfortable yet with the process, only because I have not done it before. This helped me get acquainted with the process, so hopefully practice will make perfect.

I feel like I was very successful in carrying out the course assignments for instructional management. I consider myself somewhat technologically savvy, and this course enabled me to use my skills to produce work, while learning about technology in the education world that I was previously unaware of. The only issue I ran into along the way was formatting. My computer has the new 2007 Microsoft Office program, which I saved many of my assignments on. This made it to where other students who had an earlier version of Word could not open my files on the discussion boards, and my instructional coach could not view my PowerPoint slideshow on my blog. Both of these issues were resolved when I changed the formatting of my documents to save to the earlier versions. Other than simple formatting issues, I feel that I was successful in my coursework and I learned a lot form the information and the application.

I learned a lot in this course about technology that can be used in the classroom and how schools are guided and evaluated by the state based on technology usage. My personal philosophy on education has not changed much since the beginning of the course. I love the idea of implementing new technology in the classroom because I am from a young generation that has grown up immersed in technology. If we allow our schools to slip too far below this technology curve, we will lose the majority of engagement from our students, especially in the secondary schools. With that being said, there are things that have to happen before technology can be implemented in schools successfully. Proper planning has to take place before implementation begins. This comes from surveying teachers to evaluate the needs in the classrooms, and formatting budgets and selecting products from their feedback. Training in the ethics of technology usage should also be done for teachers and students (if at all possible). This will help ensure that technology is beneficial for the students and school district, not a liability.

Blogging is a great tool for learning and communicating that I suspect will become more and more prevalent in educational classes, especially at the secondary and post-secondary levels. Blogging can be used as a type of discussion board, similar to the ones we used in this course, to communicate with fellow students about new information and the sharing and evaluation of ideas. It can also be used to post work for teachers to view and grade. And vice versa for teachers to post assignment updates for their students, and important information. I think creating and using a blog could be an interesting way to start a research project in a high school or middle school classroom. The blog could be created, and a post written after each piece of research is completed. There are millions of ways teachers could implement blogging as an educational tool, and I'm sure there are websites already created to help aid in this process.

There are always concerns in regards to utilizing new forms of technology in the business world, especially in education. The internet is a wide-open venue that provides anyone the access to information. Administrators and teachers may have concerns about student usage of the blogs, student safety, and teacher safety. Opening up classrooms to the World Wide Web can be scary to some because of the predators and malicious people that wonder the web also. However, if teachers and students are trained effectively on appropriate behavior while using technology, these problems can be minimized, and technology can be integrated into the classroom for the benefit of the students. Teachers and students need to know what is appropriate to post on the internet, and what type of sites and predators to avoid. Pen names could also be created for blogging, rather than using real names. There are many ways to keep this type of technology usage safe; school districts just have to take a proactive approach to doing so.

Blogging can be used in a variety of ways to communicate with school stakeholders. It can enable administrators to relay information to teachers, parents and students. This information can include the school's mission statement and goals, updates on the schools progress and state report cards, expectations and TEKS for all courses of study, and general announcements, such as weather closures, yearly calendars, and sporting events. I think it would be very neat to see a school administrator provide a weekly or monthly blog based on his or her opinion, updating stakeholders on what is going on at the school. I always like hearing (or reading) a firsthand point of view about current events. Teachers will also find blogging as an easy and effective way to communicate with their students and their students' parents. Blogging is quick and much easier to manage than a traditional website, because of this, it can be updated more often and provide a more constant and up to date form of communication between all school stakeholders. Teachers can use blogging to share upcoming important dates, such as project due dates and test schedules, post expectations, supply lists, and a general outline of the goals for their course. I currently use a user-friendly website to communicate with my parents and students, and I like the idea of utilizing a blog to do the same.

 

 

Technology Action Plan- Week 4

Technology Action Plan

Personnel Title	Name	Responsibilities
Principal	Andre Smith	The principal is the leader of instruction on each individual campus, even though they are not directly in the classroom. The principals' job includes helping create actions plans, providing surveys or other forms of measurement and feedback, coordinating with the district for planning and professional development, sharing and monitoring ideas for technology in the classroom, and modeling the usage of technology.
SBDM committee members	All individuals chosen to lead the campus decisions	The members of the site-based decision making committee are responsible for creating an action plan for their individual schools. They should also be responsible for contacting Annette Duvall about possible adding technology objectives to the campus and district improvement plans.
Coordinator of instruction technology	Annette Duvall	The district technology coordinator is responsible for using the state's standards and best-practices knowledge to lead the implementation of technology across the district. This involves communicating goals and expectations clearly with all schools and administrators.
Teachers	All instructional teachers on campus	Teachers are the implementers of the plan. They model correct technology usage in the classroom and use technology in their lesson plans to benefit the students.

 

Professional Development Planning

The following sessions will be available, and teachers can decide what to attend based on the resources available to them, their skill level, and their interests, in order to maximize the effectiveness of the sessions.

    There will be a professional development session devoted to teaching teachers about the laws regarding technology usage, both for them and their students. Included will be guidelines for how to teach students to be cautious online consumers, and to monitor them efficiently and effectively.

    I would like to create a professional development session designed to help teachers understand the technology that is already available on our campus. At North Crowley Ninth grade this would include learning how to use SmartBoards, clickers, Skype, blogs, PodCasts, Movie Maker, and personal websites. This can be done at varying levels if necessary to accommodate for more advanced users and less advanced users.

    Because our district and campus do not include technology measures in our improvement plans, I would like our SBDM committee members to attend a professional development session designed to help them understand how to effectively and efficiently evaluate data and use it to set and meet goals. This can be helpful not only in our technology action plan, but also in the use of all other data the members evaluate.

    Our SBDM members will also attend a professional development session to teach them how to convey results of the data collected based on our action plan, along with the state STaR chart and Long Range Plan data to all stakeholders. This will enable them to use their newly acquired analysis skills to help become informers of the information to the other teachers, in order to encourage improvements across the campus and district.

 

Evaluation Planning for Action Plan

Our evaluation measures will be set up based upon the goals of the action plan, and evaluated by the principal and site-based decision making committee members. All information gained will be helpful in the needs assessment for further technology planning. Here are some of the evaluation measures to be utilized, outside of the already utilized STaR chart and Texas Long Range Plan.

Post-Professional Development Surveys- In order to improve on professional development sessions and measure their level of helpfulness, some type of post-session surveys need to be created. This can be in the form of a plus/delta discussion at the end of each session, or by actual surveys to be filled out and turned in by participants, or perhaps both. Most participants will be honest in their feedback, and this will help administrators and presenters understand their needs more efficiently and effectively.

Classroom Walkthroughs- After action plans are created and professional development sessions have been attended, I would expect administrators to use walk-though mini observations as a way to evaluate how often and how well technology is being used in individual classrooms. This information can be analyzed in SBDM committee meetings to understand how effectively the plan is being implemented in the classrooms.

Student feedback- Student feedback may be the hardest evaluation process to complete, however it would be very useful to see how the students feel about technology usage and progress within each campus. This would be especially useful at the secondary level, as students, being technologically savvy, could provide suggestions for improvement.

 

Week 1, Post 1, STaR Chart: Infrastructure

The Texas Long Range Plan for Technology was developed to help school districts, administrators and teachers understand what areas they should be proficient in utilizing, offering to students for their development, and how they should be using their funding to increase student learning to the highest level.

    The area of the Long Range Plan that I am interested in is the infrastructure for technology. The infrastructure for technology is the backbone of the schools support for students' and teachers' technological needs. In my opinion, this is the most important area because without a strong foundation, advanced technology cannot be effectively implemented. With schools becoming more and more technology focused, the strong infrastructure becomes even more of a focus. The three areas of focus within the infrastructure category include: internet access, internet connectivity speed and technical support.

    At my campus, over the last three years the first two areas, internet access and connectivity speed have improved from the lower "developing" category to "advanced," while technical support has faltered between "developing" and the lowest level "early." As a state, 57% of Texas schools rank as "advanced" in the area of infrastructure. This is great news for Texas overall, and it shows that my district, ranking "developing" overall, has fallen behind and needs to make efforts for improvement. This trend shows that, as a whole, infrastructure is one of the most improved upon areas in the last few years, both in my district and state-wide. The improvement will hopefully improve until the majority of schools reach the highest "target" level of technology achievement.

    My recommendations for improving infrastructure at the national, state and local levels, involves stronger employment opportunities for technology support and stronger campus-wide accessibility. My campus has made strides this year in internet access, by making the entire school wireless internet compatible. However, our technical support still lacks strongly. We have one person who is dedicated to the technology of two very large 5A campuses. Needless to say, technology requests can be slow to completion. Another answer to this issue would be offering teachers, especially those interested in technology, professional development to teach them how to become operators and managers on campus. As they become trained and help on technology tasks on campus they could be rewarded professional development credit hours or salary stipends. This usage could eliminate the need for adding a high-paying full-time position.

    The Long Range Plan for improvement in Texas is making our schools more aware of the needs of campuses and students, and will hopefully help make our students more technologically ready for our ever-changing world.

STaR Chart Presentation

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Week 1, Blog 3, Pre K TEKS and Spiraling Curriculum

One of my main educational philosophies is that students have to have a strong foundation rooted in education in order to succeed throughout the educational journey. The TEKS for Pre K students are designed to create a foundation for each student to build upon in order to make them successful. Teachers focus on making students socially aware and responsible through interactions and skill building. They also focus on speech and communication. Basic levels of English, reading and mathematics are also introduced. One skill that is not specifically mentioned as a domain, but is a part of each strand, is the development of daily routines. This is probably one of the most important things that is taught in the early years of a child's education. Establishing what the expectations are for each day prepare students for middle school, high school, and their future career fields. I have no elementary education experience and found the Pre K TEKS to be very interesting!

A spiralled curriculum is one based learning basic ideas numerous times and at varying degrees of difficulties. The philosophical idea behind a spiralled curriculum is that if some students do not grasp the information the first time around, hopefully they will understand it the second or third time. However, the students who did grasp it the first time are spiralling upward and moving their skill on to a higher level. The technology TEKS are designed to be a spiralled curriculum because they can use the same skills multiple times in higher level processes. For example, the foundations section of the technology TEKS (#2) focuses on students learning how to input information into the computer using various devices. TEKS #5 under the information acquisition strand, calls on students to acquire information using proper search methods on search engines within the school database and on the Internet. Another TEKS (#8) in the problem solving strand, is on a higher level of the spiral, and allows students to work outside of the school in online organizations to acquire information. This calls upon their skills from TEKS #2 and TEKS #5 to be used again. Without these original TEKS on the spiral plan this new TEKS assignment would not be possible. I like the idea of spiraling curriculum because it allows for diverse students, which are abundant in every classroom setting.

Week 1, Post 2, Long Range Plan

The Long-Range Plan for technology in Texas is a great guide for administrators and teachers. It details all aspects of technology in schools and how it can best be developed, managed and assessed. As an administrator, this plan can be used to gauge how your school is currently using technology and the steps it needs to take to improve in various areas and become more equitable. I, as a current teacher, also find this useful to help understand the state's goals for technology in my classroom and on my campus. It would be very beneficial for administrators to share this information with teachers to encourage growth in the area. I feel that one of the best ways to encourage improvement in the area of technology would be to assess the "defining the need for change" section of the plan. I also like the use of surveys in the "teachers voice" sections. This information was useful to me, and would be great for administrators to share with stakeholders. It provides concrete data for why our schools need to be using technology to prepare our students for the future.

Week 1, Blog 1, Technology Assessments

My Application and Evaluation of the Technology Assessments

According to the Technology Applications Inventory, I seem to be stronger in the areas of problem solving and communication than in foundations and information acquisition. This assessment surprised me greatly. If I had been asked which of the four my strong areas were, I would have chosen the two areas that I ranked lowest on. I am glad that I took the survey to show me not only the areas that need improving, but particularly the things that I do not understand, such as search strategies, storage systems and technology laws.

For the second assignment I took the SETDA Teacher survey, because my current position is as a teacher. This survey asked me about the technology that is available to me at my school, and how often and comfortable I feel with the equipment. My school has some technology equipment beyond the traditional classroom equipment. This includes smart boards and electronic handheld white boards. I feel comfortable with traditional technology in the classroom and use it daily, however, the more advanced technology that my school has provided has not been put to use to the highest degree because many of us, myself included, do not feel comfortable using it. While we could have more technology available at my school, I think the main area that we lack in is professional development to teach teachers how to utilize the instruments that are already available to us.

Our world, especially in the education field, is becoming more and more technologically advanced and more things require an accurate knowledge of how to use technology effectively and efficiently. As a teacher, advancements in technology are important as an educational tool, and for communication with stakeholders. I use technology in my classroom every day, with the use of PowerPoint notes and projectors to our classroom website that updates my students and their parents on important classroom announcements and due dates. As an administrator it is vitally important to understand and be the campus leader on implementing the use of technology effectively. Communication through technology is the most important aspect of an administrator to understand and utilize. This includes communication with all stakeholders, through email, websites, and more. I am a younger teacher, and I grew up with the ever-changing technology-based society, so I plan to keep learning and using technology in my profession as much as possible.