Natalie Janiszewski ET 691 Internship Portfolio
Course Reflections
ET 605 ~ Introduction to Educational Technology
ET 605 was the first course of the program. We were introduced to Microsoft Office programs such as: Word, PowerPoint and Excel and required to become proficient using them. However, I was most impressed with the Moodle and how effective and efficient an online course management system can be for students and instructors. This course clearly painted the big picture of what instructional technology is and how it impacts teaching and learning. Technology is a powerful tool meant to enhance learning and should only be used to improve instruction. We were also introduced to technologies that were not well-known to all of us, but they were being used readily in classrooms across the county. The MS Office skills I developed during this course came in handy when trying to implement the GAFE and were vital when I created spreadsheets for Team Leaders to use while gathering data for field trips involving all the students of an entire grade-level.
ET 610 ~ Curricular Applications of Technology
ET 610 was a hands-on and FUN class because I was able to create or improve upon lessons using technologies that were already installed on my laptop or available on the Internet. Developing these technologically enhanced lessons was time consuming. I remembered this during my internship and would always offer teachers my help to reduce or remove this obstacle to implementing an effective technology. Every teacher wants to save time and be more productive, but this is not a reality if they do not have a live-person to provide support and expertise when needed. In this class, I created a Google Form that was a Science Safety Quiz and wrote a formula to grade each student's results. I am so glad I did this in ET 610 because with the HCPSS' implementation of the GAFE, I was able to share this advanced feature with interested teachers using Google Forms. We also spent time evaluating websites and various technologies. The ability of an educator to critically evaluate the content, reliability, and appropriateness of technology to be used in a classroom is essential. I relied on this skill in my internship to prioritize which innovations to implement.
AD 662 ~ Leadership, Supervision and Staff Development
This course focused on characteristics of leaders and their effectiveness. Based on the readings, written reflections, and discussions, this course helped me define my role as an educational leader. Put another way, this class helped me strategize my approach as a tech leader in the building. I want to support and inspire my colleagues. I want to be a real leader and advocate, not a bureaucrat or politician. I now realize I must play some politics to gain support and/or good standing with superiors. Furthermore, I relied on the knowledge I gained from this course as I faced the issues of staff buy-in, creating a learning community, politics and creating a shared vision while planning staff development opportunities.
Successful leadership is a complex and complicated task. Leadership is a choice and to be able to actually accomplish the selected goal(s) and/or objective(s), the leader must posses a variety of interpersonal and technical skills. So, if you are the leader or playing a leadership role, you often behave like a ski-boat driver. You drive the boat forward towards the goal while continuously looking backwards to make sure that everyone is still with you. You may slow down, speed up, go over or around obstacles while making sure that your constituents are still skiing behind the boat and completing their tasks while steering the boat towards the goal or objective the group is trying to achieve.
Through coaching, consulting and collaboration educators can achieve greatness. I think we are slowly developing these types of professional learning communities with the aid of technology, but with the power of leadership this can occur at a faster pace. Another way to build capacity is to develop and implement a professional development plan that is informed by all stakeholders. I sought input from all stakeholders and expected all participants to give their best effort. Proactive leaders encourage and facilitate in ways that enable each person to achieve optimal performance within the context of their skills and interests. Additionally, they expect constituents to grow and improve their capacities. This type of leadership allows for effective interaction and facilitates the development of teachers as professionals. It is within this type of collaborative-professional culture that great things are imagined and achieved. I know I am highly motivated, creative and productive in this type of situation. Thus I chose to be a proactive leader during my internship.
Successful leadership is a complex and complicated task. Leadership is a choice and to be able to actually accomplish the selected goal(s) and/or objective(s), the leader must posses a variety of interpersonal and technical skills. So, if you are the leader or playing a leadership role, you often behave like a ski-boat driver. You drive the boat forward towards the goal while continuously looking backwards to make sure that everyone is still with you. You may slow down, speed up, go over or around obstacles while making sure that your constituents are still skiing behind the boat and completing their tasks while steering the boat towards the goal or objective the group is trying to achieve.
Through coaching, consulting and collaboration educators can achieve greatness. I think we are slowly developing these types of professional learning communities with the aid of technology, but with the power of leadership this can occur at a faster pace. Another way to build capacity is to develop and implement a professional development plan that is informed by all stakeholders. I sought input from all stakeholders and expected all participants to give their best effort. Proactive leaders encourage and facilitate in ways that enable each person to achieve optimal performance within the context of their skills and interests. Additionally, they expect constituents to grow and improve their capacities. This type of leadership allows for effective interaction and facilitates the development of teachers as professionals. It is within this type of collaborative-professional culture that great things are imagined and achieved. I know I am highly motivated, creative and productive in this type of situation. Thus I chose to be a proactive leader during my internship.
ED 670 ~ Teacher Research & Inquiry
ED 670 was an intense and difficult class because of the amount of technical reading and writing that was required. However, I learned a great deal about the types and kinds of research and how to evaluate "research" as valid. For my paper, I chose a research topic that served me well during my internship. I wrote an hermeneutic phenomenological research paper titled: The Real Story: The Lived Experience of Science Teachers at Bonnie Branch Middle School. Essentially, my paper is about the double life of teachers. To their supervisors educators tell a cover story because in good conscience they cannot do what their boss is telling them to do - teach to the test. In the classroom and among trusted colleagues, the real story of what actually goes on in the classroom is told. This condition has now been made worse by Race to the Top mandates. My fellow teachers are openly expressing change fatigue. This is a huge obstacle for me, the Ed Tech Intern, who wants to implement new technologies! As a result, I chose to introduce the GAFE (Google Apps for Educators) as an innovation that will save teachers time while increasing their productivity. Because this was true and I think I am considered a "trusted" colleague, the educators in my building accepted this new idea and all are using it in some way. This same strategy is working with the implementation of adaptive and assistive technologies for special education students. We are only training teachers on technologies they already have. In other words, I am not asking the teachers to do something new! I also believe that I work with an exceptional staff that has high standards thus the hook of increased effectiveness and efficiency is an easy sell.
ED 608 ~ Educational Innovations
ET 608 was an interesting class because it focused on the complexity of education reform in inner-cities. This course made clear the the dysfunction of reform in education. I was easily able to relate my research to this class as well. We did not focus exclusively on the history of reform, but dissected examples from the perspectives of various stakeholders. It became clear that stakeholder input is necessary to design a reform that has any chance of working. I also took away that the best designed plans must change based upon the input of the implementers. If course corrections are not made the reform will be less successful or even fail. As I began to plan for my internship, I did not want the educators in my school to feel that they were laborers in the factory of educational reform so I continually seek input from all stakeholders in order to assure that we are meeting the needs of the teachers, students and administrators as well as our goals. It makes me feel like the driver of a boat pulling a water skier. I am continually looking forward to see if we are on course towards our goal while constantly looking backwards to make sure that everyone is still with me. For example, after the implementation of the Computer Reservation Calendar I sent out an anonymous survey for users to complete. Based on the feedback, I changed the calendar to allow teachers to book their own reservations and it has been a great success.
ET 680 ~ The Role of the Technology Leader
ET 680 was a fast paced class with a heavy workload and it provided me with a great deal of understanding and skill for my internship. Put another way, this class connected a lot of dots! This course offered a wealth of information on how to implement and negotiate change in our school as well as the institution as a whole. Moreover, this course was instrumental in preparing me for the transition of classroom teacher to technology resource teacher. Several of the assignments felt like simulations that enabled me to develop the skills we would need to be successful during our internships and beyond! Additionally, we learned about Ely's Conditions and the ACOT Model which I often referred to while planning and reflecting on my internship proposal and implementation. They are great analytical tools and proved invaluable when I reflected on progress or lack of progress. The grant my group and I wrote in this class was used to collaborate with the GT Teacher and a group of students at my school to research and ultimately apply for a grant with Bright Minds to purchase iPads. Based on the class grant writing experience, I contacted Bright Minds to determine what we could do to increase our chances of being funded and even got a committee member to critique our application before submission. We will find out next month if our grant will be funded.
ET 641 ~ Universal Design for Learning with Technology
ET 641 was not about instruction for special education students, it was about designing instruction to meet all the needs of the learners in your class. This is a huge task and seems unachievable without the help of technology. This class inspired me to add strategic planning with the Special Education Department to my internship proposal. I learned about so many effective adaptive and assistive technologies in this class that I became keenly aware that few to none of them were implemented at my school. I wanted to use my internship as an opportunity to increase staff knowledge and skill level thus the quality of instruction at my school by determining what technologies we have and training staff how to use them.
ET 620 ~ Multimedia Design in the Classroom
We discussed design, development and evaluation of multimedia projects. Additionally, we learned about VBA codes as well as creating and editing iMovies. I was a beginner at iMovie and have advanced my skills so that I am now able to help colleagues create iMovies for instruction. ET 620 was a challenging class because I had never written scripts before. We all joked that we would never use VBA, but I had to write code as part of my internship! During the creation of a complex spreadsheet in Google, I found that I could not get a column to turn red after 30 student had signed up in that column. This is a simple feature in Excel, but the GAFE version of Excel is too primitive for this feature. After doing some research, I found that I was not the only frustrated GAFE user, many people were complaining too about the lack of features in the Google version of Excel. Since all homeroom teachers would be using this spreadsheet, it had to be in the GAFE because many teachers would be entering their data simultaneously. I was able to write short scripts for other features on the spreadsheet, but the column turning red was too complicated for me to figure out. Ultimately I found a website that would let me enter excel commands and it would produce the script I needed to turn the column for handball signups red after 30 students and let all homeroom teachers know that that activity was full. Without this class, I would not have had a clue how to solve this problem and would therefore have failed at this task.
ET 631 ~ Distance Learning
I really enjoyed learning about the history and evolution of distance learning in ET 631. Education is a powerful tool and distance learning makes that power accessible to anyone with a computer and the Internet. Whether the class is face-to-face or online, a good instructor designs the lessons to meet the needs of his or her learners! In other words, any courses that are well-designed are highly-likely to be successful. Distance education course development is generally team-based to ensure the creation of high-quality materials, experiences, and more satisfactory teaching and learning experiences. I believe that the need to fully design a DE class prior to starting the course combined with the technical skills required to invent engaging modules that utilize multiple media, created the need for instructional design teams which just about guarantees high-quality instruction and learning. This is a huge step in the right direction for education because is creates the infrastructure to develop first-class courses. It is like a dream come true. I tried to emulate that team-approach in my internship by bringing in the SpEd Tech resource teachers to co-plan with staff members. I also made sure that I co-planned, consulted and collaborated with every teacher that was interested.
In this class, we had to create a proposal to fund a project that we designed. My group chose Google Apps for Education (GAFE) training because one member was piloting it at her school. This project helped me design a well-rounded proposal that include an in depth analysis of cost, viability, and stakeholder input. I was able to use significant parts of it for the GAFE Training at my school. In the proposal we decided to use PDS (Professional Development School) funding to pay educators who participate in the training. I used PDS funding for after-school training at my school. Without this funding I would not have been able to pay more than 10 teachers to participate in the training nor would I have been able to attract more than 5 teachers to the workshop!
In this class, we had to create a proposal to fund a project that we designed. My group chose Google Apps for Education (GAFE) training because one member was piloting it at her school. This project helped me design a well-rounded proposal that include an in depth analysis of cost, viability, and stakeholder input. I was able to use significant parts of it for the GAFE Training at my school. In the proposal we decided to use PDS (Professional Development School) funding to pay educators who participate in the training. I used PDS funding for after-school training at my school. Without this funding I would not have been able to pay more than 10 teachers to participate in the training nor would I have been able to attract more than 5 teachers to the workshop!
ET 630 ~ Digital Communication in the Classroom
I am scheduled to take this class during the Spring of 2013.
ET 690 ~ Educational Technology Seminar
I am scheduled to take this class during the Summer of 2013.