Week+4


 * Week 4 Assignment, Part 4.2 **

Most of the courses I took with Lamar guided me in learning and prepared me for the job I currently hold as technology liaison. If I had to narrow down the six most helpful classes, I would begin with EDLD 5364, Teaching With Technology. Teaching with Technology really bridged my understanding of technology such as hardware and software applications with how to implement this technology within the classroom, to help my students learn. It is one thing to understand how technology works but it is another to integrate it into the curriculum. EDLD 5345 Human Resource Management would be my second choice of most valuable classes that I took at Lamar because of the guidance it gave me when dealing with ethical decisions, how the law applies to the use of technology, and how to develope the school rules when dealing with technology. This class was valuable because there is so much continual growth in technology that there may not be laws or rules to govern the use of it, which is where the district needs to step up their relations.

EDLD 5306 is Concepts of Educational Technology that helps the leader, essentially lead. Concepts of Educational Technology really brought into focus the scope of the technology leader in a educational setting. It is the merging of staff and administrations ideas with relation to technology all to benefit the student. With this piece, the leader learns how to implement trainings, identify best practices, and offers guidance on the path to a more technologically advanced classroom. Without the guidance from the leadership, there would be little push to change outdated ways of teaching into the 21st century. I work in a very diverse school district with many different cultures represented. In addition to serving various cultures, I work at a special assignment campus that deals with only emotionally disturbed students, who require a lot of real world experience and hands on activities to keep them involved. This course and its assignments have prepared me for the task of engaging my students and offering them an opportunity to express their talents in a way that is educational as well as fun. In this course I learned a great deal about wiki’s and blogging and how they can be great educational tools that can be integrated into many core subjects. When teaching history, I could have the students blog with other students across the United States or from other countries. If we were discussing the American Revolution, I can find a school that would be willing to blog from the Carolina’s or the North East where many of the battles took place. Being able to make a historical connection to certain subjects while using technology would be priceless by enabling students to connect to others for the purpose of gathering data.

EDLD 5344, School Law was a class dedicated to studying particular cases related to technology. Case law in education is always valuable to study, due to its ability to mirror things that transpire in the educational setting. The School Law course gave me great incite to the power of having researched school law and using it to guide decisions about policies related to technology.

EDLD 5362, Information Systems Management would be my fifth choice of most valuable classes I took while at Lamar. Although I did not enjoy this class as much as others, it helped me have an understanding of how technology can be used in many different forums. During this class we had to create an avatar in Simple Life, which is a program dedicated to a virtual world, where people can have interactions in a digital world. This was a difficult concept for me to understand but it gave me great incite to technology that I had not previously experienced. In Information Systems Management, we also created a newsletter that stretched our ability to create something that we could express our ideas in a different way, other than typing in a Word document. Like I expressed above, EDLD was not one of my favorite classes but I did learn a great deal from it.

EDLD 5363 Video Technology and Multimedia was a fascinating course dedicated to teaching about ways to use multimedia within the classroom. I learned a great deal about ways students can express their own ideas through other avenues other than paper, PowerPoint, and glue. This class really stretched my thinking in that we had to create a video and edit it. I had previously never done anything like this but I have taken what I learned from this class and applied to my classroom, where students are now creating amazing videos, as well as introducing this concept into my staff developments. Another thing Video Technology and Multimedia showed me was that there is a plethora of free programs available to be used in all types of ways.


 * Week 4 Assignment, Part 4.3 **

EDLD 5363 Video Technology and Multimedia was a fascinating course dedicated to teaching about ways to use multimedia within the classroom. I learned a great deal about ways students can express their own ideas through creative avenues other than paper, PowerPoint, and glue. This class really stretched my thinking when we had to create a video and edit it. I had never done anything like this in the past but I have taken what I learned from this class and applied it to my classroom, where students are now creating amazing videos and I have also used this knowledge to enhance my staff developments. Another thing Video Technology and Multimedia showed me was that there is a plethora of free programs available to be used in all types of ways.
 * Assignment 4-4: Reflections on assignments in EDLD 5365 Web Design **

EDLD 5365, Web Design was a class dedicated to designing and creating a web page. The information I gained from performing the assignments in this class was very informative and taught me a great deal about what goes into creating a web page and placing it online. Web Design opened my eyes to the usefulness and ease of creating an online webpage that could be accessible by the world. I did find that many of the graphics or other texts were not compatible with the programs that were used to turn information into web language. I have already used some of the knowledge gained from this class to create a webpage for my class, outlining the projects we have done in Biology throughout this school year. I continue to do research on web page design and layout but one of the most difficult issues I have with web design is finding free software that will support the size of information I am transferring to web format.


 * Week 4 Assignment, Part 4.5 **

Chapter 7 of Technology Facilitation and Leadership Standards outlines many of the best practices and managerial tasks when identifying a technology need, obtaining technology, and distributing the technology in a fair, equitable and logical order. According to national reports, “educators have reached the connectivity and student-to-computer ratio goals established by the U.S. Department of Education” from the mid-1990’s (Williamson & Redish p. 148). I see reaching this goal, this late in the plan, as a major issue with education. In the current fiscal state of education in the United States today, technology will be slowed down even more.

As I was reading through Chapter 7, I found the strength and weakness table on page 151 and found it interesting, in that it does a nice job of outlining the issues that technology personnel have seen with the use of laptops and desktops. Many of the issues that Williamson & Redish outline, are issues I have seen myself, such as “desktops are more reliable and durable than laptops” or the use of a desktop is “easier to secure from theft or misuse” (p. 151). As an adaptive behavior teacher, I have learned many things about what type of hardware technology I offer to certain students, for fear of them throwing or mistreating the technology. In my classroom, I have both laptops and desktops but the children that have a history of throwing things will certainly not be offered a laptop. One of the benefits Williamson & Redish noted was that the ease of traveling from place to place with a laptop made performing different tasks at different places much more efficient.

The budget in which education is dealing with today is becoming slimmer and slimmer and the lack of funds will inevitably be seen in technology. One of the things Williamson & Redish pointed out was that in planning for the purchasing of education technology one needs to plan for future costs associated with the particular technology. In looking at a simple desktop, I could see a much larger expense in software and peripherals such as printers, scanners, and projectors to just name a few. Williamson & Redish also noted that when budgeting for new technology, one should also include conversation for implementation, support, and maintenance. I learned a great deal in Chapter 7 of Technology Facilitation and Leadership Standard because many of the things it discussed were things I had previously thought about but had not researched in that amount of detail. I have always understood the need for technology in the classroom and will continue to push the use of it within education but now I plan to go to greater length to do research to identify the TCO or total cost of ownership.

Bibliography CDW-G (2007). School safety index. Retrieved November 6, 2011, from http;//webobjects.cdw.com/webobjects/docs/pdfs/cdwg_scool_safety_index_2007.pdf

Nardi, B., & O’Day, V. (1999)Information ecologies: Using technology with hearth. Cambridge, MA: MIT.

Williamson, J. & Redish, T. (2009). //Technology facilitation and leadership standard: What every K-12 leader should know and be able to do//. Eugene, OR: International Society for Technology in Education.


 * Assignment 4-6: Reflections on Technology Facilitator Standard VIII: Leadership and Vision **

“Both Standard VII and Standard VIII have a strong administrative focus, but they address different types of functions and tasks” (Williamson, J. & Redish p. 177). Chapter 8 outlines the leadership reponsibilities when dealing with educational technology. One of the most important goals of ledership is “inspiring a diverse group of people to establish and accomplish common goals” (Anderson & Dexter, 2000). Without providing leadership and inspiring many different people to work together, programs and ideas will not move any further than good intentions.

To move from any idea towards a vision that people can buy into and work with, all people in the group need to “construct a shared vision for technology use” (Williamson, J. & Redish p. 179). The vision outlines where the school and educators see technololgy supporting curriculum in the school, as well as outlining the stakeholders in the technology plan. The stakeholders will not only include students, teachers, and school level administrators but the community, district level administrators, board members and business partners. One of the most important resources when developing a vision is having input from the local business about the technology their employees are using and greater understanding of other technology their employees currently to do not know. With this understanding and knowledge, school leaders can better prepare their students for their careers.

An interesting point Williamson, J. & Redish made was that stakeholders are sometimes reluctant to implement certain types of technology based on their lack of understanding of the need or use. If schools include their stakeholders in specialized technology staff development this group will become more comfortable with the technology and gain an understanding of the usefulness of this type of learning. “Simply including certain components in a technology plan does not ensure an exemplary plan” but including other attributes could help create a great student and curriculum focused plan for the future (Williamson, J. & Redish p. 181). Some of the quailities an exemplary plan will focus on is student learning, be grounded in best researched practice, wide-ranging, simple and clearly written, achievable, measurable, and logical. Although all of these are vital to the success of the technology plan, some stand out more to me than others, such as achievable and measurable. We have all seen goals that were not achieveable in the near (2-3 years) future and this sometimes taxes people that are responsible for overseeing the plan. I feel that plans that last to long or goals that are extraodinarily high, may never be achieved. One example of this is the connectivity and student-to-computer ratio goals established by the U.S. Department of Education that were set in the mid-1990’s where it took almost twenty years to achieve. Secondly, the goals set forth by the technology leadership is that the goals need to be measurable. Any orginization will not be able to gain a better understanding of their goals if along the way they cannot be measured. “There must be assigned staff and resources to implement the ongoing evaluation” of all the goals the technology commitee has created (Kotter 1996).

Bibliography Anderson, R., & Dexter, S. (2000). //School technology leadership: Incidence and impact.// Retrieved on November 26, 2011, from [|www.crito.uci.edu/tlc/findings/report_6/startpage.html]

Kotter, J. (1996). //Leading change//. Boston: Harvard University Press

Williamson, J. & Redish, T. (2009). //Technology facilitation and leadership standard: What every K-12 leader should know and be able to do//. Eugene, OR: International Society for Technology in Education.