November+2010

This internship is starting to take a toll on my personal time and I've little time to complete my Lamar coursework. I have taken advantage of the week off we are given between the five week class rotations. As we near the Thanksgiving and Christmas break, I'm starting to realize that this program is going by so fast. In this week I sat with Mr. Ector Lopez (mentoree), Mr. Ortega and Mr. Garza, all math teachers on how to use online resources to to quiz or assess their students easily. Formative assessment is a crucial topic in education today. Personally, I hate to grade any type of papers so I have turned to the web to do that for me. One of the easiest way to create a test is to use GoogleDocs forms and allow students to take the survey (quiz) and quickly receive a tallied score. These online, easy to use tools have helped me reduce clutter and engage my students to work harder in my classroom. Other online sites that I suggested to these eager math teachers include Quizbuilder, and ProProfs (very good one). QuizBuilder allow you to create and embed the quizzes onto our teacher webpages for quick and easy access. The higher end program offered by ProProfs allows users to insert text, images and other important elements to increase the effectiveness of the quiz. Even better, it grades it for you! Although Mr. Ortega and Mr. Garza were hesitant about using these tools because they didn't have frequent access to a computer lab, Mr. Lopez became creating his quiz on the spot. Mr. Lopez does not have frequent access to a lab but is always looking for ways to engage his classroom and improve his teaching skills using technology. On a separate not, this is one of the reasons why I chose Mr. Lopez as my mentoree due to his eagerness to learn and apply what is taught to him immediately. From the look of it, Mr. Garza and Mr. Ortega will not be using these resources however I am glad that Mr. Lopez will become a leader in his subject area and hopefully inspire his team of teachers to follow his lead. I believe that his activity was related to and helped me master the following standards/indicators: TF-I.A.2. / TF-IV.A.1. / TF-IV.A.2. Since this activity dealt with various forms of assessment method, I believe that I modeled appropriately the use of technology tools that they can use in their classroom to assess their students and improve instructions in a meaningful and systematic way.
 * Week 1: 11/1/2010 - 11/6/2010: No More Paper Quizzes**

Sources: Williamson, J., & Redish, T. (2009). //ISTE's technology facilitation and leadership standards: what every K-12 leader should know and be able to do//. Eugene,OR: International Society for Technology in Education.

Although I did not have much personal interaction with the teachers this week, I made contact through electronic mail. Every year I dread having to conduct the Texas STaR chart because I always teachers that do not complete the survey until I sit by them and make them take it. It took me a couple of hours organize the username and passwords for every single educator on campus. In addition, I had to remove teachers that have left the campus (retirement, change of campus, or other). I sent the teachers their individual username and password, a link to the STaR chart webpage and a deadline to complete. This started on Monday and the process was complete by Friday. As the day progressed, I would monitor the teacher completion of the STaR chart and send out daily reminders to complete the chart. It is mandatory that all teachers (100%) complete the STaR Chart. As always by Friday I had nearly 80% complete. I understand that teachers have much to worry about including lesson planning, meetings, parent phone calls, extracurricular activities however it surprises me that the ones who don't complete the STaR chart usually are the ones who are not involved in many of these. This forces me to sit down with the individual teacher during their conference time, log them in to the STaR chart and verify that they complete the survey. I believe that the survey provides very valuable feedback to our district and campus on how to proceed or formulate a plan of action. I believe that his activity was related to and helped me master the following standards/indicators: TF-VIII.D.2. According to the ISTE's chapter on Leadership and Vision, this task was closely related to conducting an evaluation of a school technology environment.
 * Week 2: 11/7/2010 - 11/13/2010: STaR Chart Survey**

Sources: Williamson, J., & Redish, T. (2009). //ISTE's technology facilitation and leadership standards: what every K-12 leader should know and be able to do//. Eugene,OR: International Society for Technology in Education.

I get excited when I have the opportunity to branch out into other core subject areas especially those that struggle with standardized testing. I am completely aware of the frustration that English Language Arts/Reading teachers face when they are under the radar. This week I made it a point to help out two of my very dear colleagues Ms. Germain and Mrs. Cavazos. Sometimes I pop in their classroom and admire the hard work they endure trying to teach our students. In our area Reading and Writing is extremely poor in quality. One way Mrs. Cavazos engages her students is by writing about very interesting journal topics, sometimes even controversial. It seems to have worked very well for her but she worries that in the near future students will lose interest. Ms. Germain also uses journals to get to know her students and assess their level or writing. My role in this was to introduce an alternative to traditional journal writing. One of the most popular Web 2.0 tools today is blogging. I introduced Blogger.com, a simple to use blogging service to both educators in hopes of getting them to jump on the bandwagon. They were very impressed (mostly Ms. Germain) about how to easy it was for them to setup a blog and share it. They were convinced that blogs are better (more engaging) way to improve writing skills, communication and productivity. Ms. Germain agreed that this tool was plays a pivotal role in creating authentic and original products. Although there was much excitement for using blogs, both teachers determined that they would not be using blogs in their classroom due to certain barriers. First, they are both in TAKS areas and have to stick to a strict curriculum map that has already been established for them. In that time, they could not fit in the activities using blogs. Second, they did not have frequent access to a lab to make the project worthwhile. Finally, they were worried about the implications relating to privacy concerns, web monitoring and parent consent. The last barrier highly discouraged both teachers to join in on the craze of blogging. I will attempt to convince these teachers about using blogs later during the year after they have TAKS tested all of their students. I believe that his activity was related to and helped me master the following standards/indicators: TF-II.F.1 / TF-III.A.2. / TF-III.A.7. / TF-IV.A.1. / TF-IV.C.1. / TF-IV.B.1. In this activity I was able to relate the use of a technology tool that supports the integration of communication tools (blogs) through the curriculum as well as teach concepts that support web based blogs, an authoring tools that is easy to use in all avenues including K-12 settings.
 * Week 3: 11/14/2010 - 11/20/2010: Blog In, Journals Out**

Sources: Pitler, H. (2007). Setting Objectives. //Using technology with classroom instruction that works// (pp. 34-36). Alexandria, Va.: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Williamson, J., & Redish, T. (2009). //ISTE's technology facilitation and leadership standards: what every K-12 leader should know and be able to do//. Eugene,OR: International Society for Technology in Education.

No activity
 * Week 4: 11/21/2010 - 11/27/2010**

Some time off from the classroom always does some good from me especially when I meet with my technology crew. This meeting's agenda had us in a cool frenzy since it dealt mainly with TCEA travel arrangements. We normally meet in the technology lab from 1-4 pm and try to cover as many topics as possible. Our technology director, Mr. Roland Handy, usually takes the floor and updates us with very valuable campus and district information which we relay back to the campus administration or specific departments. As mentioned before, we took up majority of this meeting registering for TCEA, booking a hotel near the Austin convention center and filling out any necessary travel forms to be approved by campus principal. Also we addressed another concern, teacher web pages. Our new superintendent is adamant that every single teacher update their teacher web page. Personally, and I hate to be pessimistic, that's not going to happen. Some teachers do not even check their emails much less update their teacher web page. We have had trainings and even offered free camera to teachers who are interested however we have not been able to motivate teachers to update their page. The last topic we were able to cover is the progress on our media systems. It seems that my campus will be the first campus to be 100% by the end of the year. That is an astonishing feat since they started working on the entire campus no less than a few months ago. I believe that his activity was related to and helped me master the following standards/indicators: TF-VII-A.3. / TF-VII-A.8. / TF-VII.B.3. / TF-VII.B.4. / TF-VII-B.5. / TF-VIII-D.7. / TF-VI.E.1. I'd have to say that these meeting in general help me master Standard VII because it involves a high deal of planning for infrastructure, hardware, software, updating policies, procedures involving district and campus technology needs that affect the classrooms and the front lines of our schools.
 * Week 5: 11/28/2010 - 11/30/2010: Monthly CTC Meeting**

Sources: Williamson, J., & Redish, T. (2009). //ISTE's technology facilitation and leadership standards: what every K-12 leader should know and be able to do//. Eugene,OR: International Society for Technology in Education.