Internship+Hours+September

Wow! What a month. I am preparing the school for deployment of new computers. Coming into this position late and not being allowed into the building until the week before school starts put me behind the eight ball as they say. I have been working my tail off trying to find all the computers, printers, and scanners worth saving. This is the repurposing list I created the first week. I finished and then someone would tell me that they also had a laptop, or a presentation cart, or a document camera. It was a lot of work making sure everything was accounted for. As I worked on this the Project manager seemed to forget about me and never requested the document. My mentor told me the more important list to worry about and the one that would take more time was the Software inventory. I could have easily put this at 20 hours and known I had worked everyone of them. I went to every computer and listed all the programs I found (I later realized I wished I would have said where I found each program). I then looked up all the software numbers so that the installers would know which specific piece of software to install. Then I met with my principal and the district instructional technologist. I was amazed the meeting lasted so long. I took the whole first half of the day going over the list I had created. I then was give direction on where to go to find purchase orders for all the software. Like many places my district is making sure they are in total compliance with software licenses. This took calling every department in the district: math, reading, technology, science, Central office, and the hardest purchase orders to find were Special Education. I had to talk to about 10 different people to find purchase orders for the wide range of softwares we had.

I continued to have classes in the lab as I worked on this project. Two grades asked me to help make a unit they were working on more DI using technology. I focused on the final products that each unit was supposed to culminate with. In first grade we created a book that included real pictures of laces in their neighborhood. The students then added a caption to their ability. This project had two big kinks both my fault. I didn't make the pictures small enough to fit the easily on the pages the first day. I fixed that for the second day. The second they were able to print but the new printer didn't want to print using the bypass tray. I feel bad not having fully tested the project before hand but I had only the weekend to create it and it worked well at home. I know that I am going to have to work hard to make it up to those first two teachers in order to continue to have them be open to technology.

The third grade team asked for a differentiated project on communities and government. I did this by creating a power point template, an example powerpoint, a brochure, and a vokie option for them to do with the students. As I created the different projects I started by looking at the important concepts. I then made sure that any project would cover some of the topics so as the class shared the students would be exposed to a variety of important topics (McTighe &Tomas, 2003). I worked hard to get this ready and got their approval but I haven't seen them in the lab to work on this project. Third grade started out gung ho on using the computers but fell off after their first project. I think this because they two had a late move into their room and had to recently add a teacher. Two of the teachers are on the team leader committee so they have other responsibilities as well. I am trying to lure them back in by making the projects as easy on them as I can.

A third grade teacher asked me to teach a lesson on the spot lesson about making a brochure in publisher. I know the program well so it wasn't a problem but I think I may need to be careful about allowing teacher to feel that they can ask for a lesson at the last minute. It may come back and bite me at some point.

I conducted three one hour long trainings for the parents on the system, Parent Connect. It is a way for parents to view grades, attendance, and lunch balance. It is a great system and really opens up what the schools are doing to those busy parents and the parents of students that never bring papers home. The trainings went well I had one parent have trouble with the lunch system and it took a few emails but I was able to help her get the low balance email reminder set up. I also did a staff training on the math intervention Riverdeep or Destination Math as it is also known. I trained the staff in signing in, setting up classes, setting ups differentiated groups, assigning lessons, viewing time spent, and on student log ins. Trainings are important so that we don''t just have hardware sitting around collecting dust (Solomon & Schrum, 2007)

I am now the webmaster for my school. At the training they told us to make the links from the school page permanent links and the teachers can add temporary links to units of study to their outreach pages(District supplied template web pages). I decided not to install two grades links to the web page because they were units of study and not more permanent links. I think this may have bothered the team leaders. I told them I would add them to the team outreach page and show them. This did appease them some. Both fourth and fifth grade teams mentioned that the outreach page is not visited as often as the school page. I hope this isn't true because this is where parents with internet access can get the latest news of what is happen in their child's class without having to wait for a weekly, biweekly or even monthly newsletter. William and Redish(2009) state that web pages can be a powerful communication tool.I think this may be an area that I need to do some further training in order to help teachers see the benefit of this to them. Then I will need to train the parents in the community so they can also how much it benefits them. As I learn and do more it seems that I discover their is more to do. I truly love the job and want to help my school reach it's potential. I know that with the right guidance I can make a huge positive impact on this small community school.

**References**

McTighe, J., & Tomas, R.S. (2003). Backward design for forward action. //Educational Leadership//, 60(5), 52-55.

Solomon, G., & Schrum, L. (2007). //Web 2.0: New tools, new schools//. Eugene, OR: International Society for Technology in Education.

Williamson, J., & Redish, T. (2009). //ISTE's Technology Facilitation and Leadership Standards: What Every K-12 Leader Should Know and Be Able to Do.// Wahsington,DC: International Society for Technology in Education

