EDLD+5388+Intern

toc =Reflections=

[|Activity log May 2010.doc]
My first activity for the internship hours was participating in the Schoology webinar. I am intrigued by learning through online webinars. Up until this point in my career, I have never participated in a webinar. I am gaining a new appreciation for this type of learning. One of my regular activities is to update my team website. I update the weekly class assignments and any announcements. This has been a great tool for students and parents that I teach. In week two, I completed my campus Star Chart and assisted other teachers in completing theirs. I definitely can see some progression in my technology skills from the previous years. The Lamar educational technology program has greatly helped in improving my technological skills. I realized that many teachers are still lacking in 21st century skills. Hopefully, more is being done through universities to educate teachers in these types of skills. Up until now, it seems to be left up to us to learn these on our own or through staff development provided by school districts. Unfortunately, not all school districts provide this type of quality professional development learning opportunities. In week three, I used my newly acquired knowledge of Schoology online courses and demonstrated it to my fellow colleagues. They liked what they saw, but few have time to explore and use it in such a short time. They do not feel comfortable teaching themselves either. I was also able to test the course out on my students. They really liked the ability to comment to each other. The socializing is what they enjoyed most because it is what they do in their daily lives. The online course was more relvent to whatthey do. I hope to incorporate this in my lessons next year as well. In week four, I jumped right in to distance learning online. I had previously received an email from WikiEducator about a free online open education resource workshop that taught you how to use WikiEducator. I was intrigued by this and signed up for the 10 day course. Little did I know that this would be a global event. There are 62 participants from 31 different countries. We have signed a learning contract to help insure the objectives of the course are being followed and met. The idea is to promote open source resources. This is a very new topic for me and I am learning much. I am amazed at the ability to learn with people from other countries. We all have unique experiences to share. It opens up a completely different world for me and one that I want to share with my students. I also joined the IT4All learning community at Integrating Technology. This learning community was established by the facilitators of the wiki course, Nellie Deutsch and Gladys Gahona. In week five, I continued to participate in the wiki course on WikiEducator. At this time, I was also sent information from my school district about Project Share. This is the Texas Education Agency's attempt to create a learning community of Texas educators. I was able to register and look around some on the site that is hosted by Epsilen and began the Texas Tour 1.0. I was able to discuss this with some of my fellow colleagues, but with the end of year soon approaching it is difficult for the focus to be on learning something new for most. Finally, my husband and his father own Major League Driving School. I am in charge of the business web site. We have been needing to update our site with more capablities. I was able to design a new, more advanced site and hope to set up the ability to make payments online as well. I have spent a good amount of time establishing this new site.

[|Activity log Jan-April.doc]
Throughout the process of securing my internship hours, I realized how active I actually am in the area of technology. This has helped me to see how much I enjoy technology and teaching it to other people. In teaching my peers, I had the most difficulty. I had decided to create a staff wiki, so our staff would have a place to go to find and share information. Many of them were eager to learn and had fun joining and editing the wiki. My school principal, Mrs. Bibb, was very helpful in advocating the use of the wiki and she wanted to ensure that only Berry Staff members would be able to access the information. As the year has progressed, only a few teachers have continued to add information to the wiki. I plan to continue the integration of the staff wiki next year. I'm still feeling overwhelmed with the concurrence of the internship course requirements and my weekly class assignments. I have begun my e-portfolio and hope to catch up soon with all the required reflections and activities.