StarChart Powerpoint

Star Chart for MHS

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My favorite so far- a draft for The National Educational Technology Plan

The brand new draft for the National Educational Technology Plan is quite an interesting and innovative document. It recommends five essential areas such as learning, assessment, teaching, infrastructure, and productivity. It understands that students’ roles with technologies are personally far more relevant outside of school and encourages educators through this plan to help bride this large gap. The plan is extremely well thought out and has incredibly thoughtful and productive solutions. That honestly at first were giant “No kidding!” moments for me while reading. I really enjoyed their professional development proposals for educators.
On page 6 it states “Episodic and ineffective professional development is replaced by professional learning that is collaborative, coherent, and continuous and that blends more effective in-person courses and workshops with the expanded opportunities, immediacy, and convenience enabled by online environments full of resources and opportunities for collaboration.” I think when I read this trumpets went off in my head and I fully realized that the authors finally “get it”. When referring to Infrastructure the plan does not merely talk about machines and basic tools but people! “The underlying principle is that infrastructure includes people, processes, learning resources, policies, and sustainable models for continuous improvement in addition to broadband connectivity, servers, software, management systems, and administration tools.”
I like how they also realize that the plan is not an end all and that we will have to continually work on improvement on each level. On page 81 it states “The underlying principle of continuous improvement is that we are unlikely to improve learning outcomes and productivity until we define and start measuring them. This starts with identifying what we seek in learning outcomes.” The plan really has some ground breaking plans that if inevitably pushed will transform the face of education but the most eye opening of all the data and grandeur was the fact that they actually want educators to comment and critique the plan!

Progress report for the TX Long-Range Report on Technology- Woo!

This progress report is the first one attached to the Long-Range plan for technology. The first portion was eye opening! I had no idea that a previous plan existed, it does not seem evident in my school history that as drastic measures were taken to promote technology. The report states the usage of each grade bracket as well as a breakdown of the technologies each group uses and differentiates between school work as well. It was no surprise that K-2 uses learning games the most. It was also disappointing that the junior and high school level students seemed to only use computers the most for writing projects. This is depressing and makes computers seem a kin to type writers! The TIP immersion pilot gave great feedback in regards to the effect of increased technology campus wide and the moral of teachers as well as the retaining of students. I also appreciated that TAKS results were significantly higher after the 3 year immersion! The TxVSN was very interesting to read about as well. I do not how I feel about the idea of a virtual school just yet. Already I can see a great number of pros and cons with this type of program. Overall the part of the report that I personally felt more interested in was the data collected from Net Day-Speak UP! It was incredibly interesting to read about the drastic differences between, student, teacher and parent. It gave lots of insight into the work we need to do as educators to really tighten the techno gap!

Tuesday Night- Lamar Web Conference!

Although the web conference was a bit tricky to begin with I found the experience to be influential and enlightening. To see co-students and your professors in such a relate-able setting was fun and humbling.  It is nice to feel a start of a community and the basics of the program were laid out by Professor Abernathy.  I was glad to hear more information about the upcoming 18 month internship. Especially the information regarding my personal selection choice, this info has really helped me ask the proper questions on my campus in order to find the right mentor. I was also glad to hear from a soon to be graduate, Glen Harrison about his experiences with the program! He explained to us how the program is overwhelming as well as confusing at first but soon we will be in our own grooves.  We all shared our amazement in the time use so far from the program and discussed where to find a few items such as book lists as well as the handbook on our epic assignments page.  I couldn’t help but wonder how beneficial an online web conference might be to my students.  I wondered how easy it could be to talk to professors at colleges who could tell as well as show off their programs to my artists.

Cool thought!

My thoughts on the Texas Long Range Plan for Technology, 2006-2020

Educator Preparation and Development is the area that I am most interested in improving on my campus. This is where my school, Manvel High School has scored the lowest on our state Star chart. We have scored a 2 or lower on all areas of professional development on this chart for the past 3 years. From this data it is quite obvious that teachers feel they are not getting the time or information they need in regards to professional development in technology. According to the plan 55% of Texas teachers rate their technology skills as average, in schools where tools aren’t the problem people seem to be. This is a bit ironic since we are striving in Texas to provide new equipment in order to fit the Long Range's plan for school Infrastructure, yet we are falling behind year by year in training our educational leaders. The results of correct and useful training are obvious as evidenced in Eric Jones article titled How to put Instructions Ahead of Technology. In his article he states a positive result of quality educator training, “The increased use of technology has helped ignite excitement in teaching and learning while building students’ critical-thinking and problem-solving skills."  After speaking with our technology leader on campus I understand that there is little funding for staff technology development.  Even less available is the time needed to allocate for training. So what can we do when the current plan is obviously not working?   I am hoping to propose a monthly technology skill workshop.  This would be incredibly informal, most likely including a snack potluck.  Teachers would come in like an open house into my computer lab and learn a useful techno based teaching tool each month.  An example may be how to start your own class blog or how to make your curriculum interactive.  With any luck this could start to level the playing field and give educators on my campus the skills they want and need. Would you come? Why? Why not?

The first bite.

Here starts my true blogness.  Prior to this I was a mere dabbler on livejournal and facebook.  Now its for real... at least for this week.