Monthly+Internship+Reflection+-+September+2010

During this month my campus supervisor and I sat down an identified areas where we could help teachers implement technology into the courses that they taught. For this month there were two teachers who I approached and presented my technology plans to. One was a Social Studies teacher and the other was as Physical Education teacher. Both of these teacher seemed open to the idea of me helping them to increase the use of technology of their respective classes. When I sat down with the Social Studies teacher and looked at the TEKS that they were required to follow I then looked at resources that were available. After searching and looking at the resources available to the Social Studies teacher, I concluded that she could start off the year using a online website named Unitedstreaming which is developed by the Discovery Channel. With this website, she could find videos that matched the TEKS that she was covering aft any particular time. For the Physical Education teacher, finding technology that could be used in this class proved to be a bigger task than I thought. Along with analyzing the Physical Education TEKS I had to identify technology that was not only effective but portable due to the fact that the classes were held in the gym. This task took me about a week to complete as I looked around at emerging trends that other schools were using and deciding if these options were feasible for my campus. By the conclusion of the following week I was able to present the teacher with a list of ideas that I had come up with that she could use. It not only listed what options were available to the Physical Education teacher to use, but I also presented ideas of how to use it. During this month I presented ideas in a Technology Committee meeting where suggestions were made on how we could implement the use of tablets in ours schools. We identified the pros and cons of tablet uses in our school and came up with a list of programs that we could use to help us make tablet use on our campus a reality. Within the classroom I opened my lab up to students to use during the morning before classes started and during their lunch period. This strategy allowed me to meet and provide assistance to students who need extra help. This extra time also helped me to meet with my students who I was able to identify failing students using Gradespeed, our online grading system. After meeting with these students, I could then use the morning and lunch lab times to have them come in to make up any work that they were missing or to provided tutorial sessions about concepts that they might not have understood. This month provided me some insight as to the role of a technologist as a system analyst, looking at problems that exists within a system and then coming up with solutions to ratify the problems that have been identified. Unlike the previous month where it was a matter of making physical changes to the technology setup of a classroom, this month required me to do research and sell an idea to a teacher about something that they could use. These activities underlined the trust that people place in technologists and solutions that they come up with.


 * Technology Standards Met:** TF - I.A, TF - I.B, TF - I.C, TF - III.D, TF - V.B, TF - VI.E, TF - VIII.B, TF -VIII.E