Reflections on Technology & Progress of Leadership Activities

Technology Skills and Knowledge Gained

While this course was fairly simple, I gained more skills in this one than I did in some of the lengthier, more challenging courses.  Prior to EDLD 5352, I was not familiar with how to use GoogleDocs (Drive) and how to collaborate using them. LiveBinders were new to me, along with many of the Web 2.0 tools that now appear on my team’s showcase google doc.  This course got me excited about incorporating more technology into my classroom and helped me see the benefits to doing so.  There is more technology out there than one person can utilize, but my becoming experts at a few tools at a time, we can make our students’ learning much more personalized and engaging. 

I have already created my own LiveBinder to be used in the 2013-2014 school year.  As the Lead Mentor for New Teachers, I am making available to them a LiveBinder filled with resources, documents, and information that they may find useful throughout their first year of teaching. I have shared this tool with district personnel, and they have asked that I present a professional development session on LiveBinders!

By collaborating with teammates via googlechat, I learned more in depth ways to use web 2.0 tools that I am already familiar with, such as googlevoice, googleearth, and quizlet.  I have found this course to be very beneficial!

Progress with Campus-Supervised Internship Activities

I have completed 118 of the required 150 campus-supervised internship activities. With that being said, however, I have only accomplished half of the tasks on the plan. This upcoming semester will require diligence and pre-planning to ensure that I have time to complete all of the required activities, targeting all 38 leadership skills. Many of the activities that I have yet to complete involve interviews and research.  I plan to shadow my principal and director of instruction in our first week of school to learn about planning, the master schedule, allocation of funds, etc. 

Progress with my Action Research Project

I hit some roadblocks last school year, but during EDLD5397, I was able to redesign and make a few changes to my action research project.  I will need to quickly act on these changes once I return for the school year.  The action research project that I had originally created was intended to help students keep up with missed assignments due to being placed in in-school suspension, or discipline management class (DMC). These students fall behind when constantly in DMC, and it is a burden for teachers to find time to reteach the lessons that these students miss. My original project involved setting up skype on the DMC computers so that students could view lessons in real-time.  I ran into a security issue when putting my plan into place - our district blocked DMC computers from having access to skype.  This caused me to change part of my plan. 

Rather than set up skype, I will provide teachers the option to have their lesson recorded on a flip camera. The DMC student helpers can be in charge of these recordings and can upload them to a sharesite for not only the DMC students but also any student needing extra review.  I believe this may be a better option anyways. We already have the flip cameras; I will just need to get approval from our DMC teacher to allow her assistants to record these lessons when requested.

I have a meeting set up with my principal on August 12^th, during which I will discuss these changes to my action research plan so that I can present the idea at our first faculty meeting in September. I should be able complete this project (or at least fully implement it) by the end of the fall semester.