Lamar University – M.Ed. in Educational Technology Leadership

Internship Field-based Activities Summary Report and Validation
Directions: This Internship Field-based Activities Summary Report is for your use as a planning worksheet. Post this report to your e-Portfolio wiki/blog/Google site monthly to document completion of your activities.
As you plan your campus- or district-supervised Internship hours, do the following:
·  Include at least one campus- or district-supervised activity under each of the 33 ISTE Technology Performance Indicators associated with the eight Technology Facilitation Standards.
·  Make sure your campus- or district-supervised activities total a minimum of 100 hours as specified in the eight Technology Standards.
·  Follow the guidelines on page 37 to reflect on each completed activity.
Your site mentor will validate the hours earned at the end of your Internship. All hours must be completed before you enroll in the Internship course, EDLD 5388/5370 *Please note that course number changes in Fall 2010*.
Once complete:
·  PDF the Validated Summary Report. This report must be signed by your site mentor.
·  Create a new page on your wiki, titled “ Completed Internship Field-based Activities Summary Report”
·  Post the completed Internship Field-based Activities Summary Report to your wiki.
Brief Description of the Activity / Date Activity Completed / Internship Hours
Standard I. Technology Operations and Concepts / TF- I.A / Create/Provide professional development for teachers in the building and integrating a website into the classroom routine. / August 2011
October 2011 / 4
4
Reflection: To me, having a classroom website is a very important step to take to help connect kids to the world they will work in when they get out of college. Students are digital natives, which is what Mark Prensky describes as students who have grown up using the technology that most adults and teachers did not. (2001). As a result of this research, I found that helping my colleagues design and implement websites is a very useful way to help connect teachers to students. Part of my role as a team leader on campus is to help my team members with their sites. As part of the district’s District Technology Staff Development Plan, teachers on every campus are supposed to grow in their use of technology and be completely proficient by 2014 (FBISD Technology Department, 2005). My work with my particular team helping them implement web use into their daily classroom routine is helping them meet this goal. Personally, I believe that being involved in this activity affirmed for me that I’d like to work with teachers in a leadership role toward helping teachers become more technological. I’d like to learn more about helping to connect digital immigrants to the digital native students that we teach. The International Society for Technology in Education or ISTE website offers a lot of solutions for professional development in the area of technology, such as leadership academies and webinars (ISTE, 2011). I plan to use this as a resource as I move forward with my career.
FBISD Technology Department. (May 2005). Fortbend independent school district technology staff
development plan. Retrieved from fortbendisd.com
International Society for Technology in Education. (November, 2011). ISTE. Retrieved from
http://www.iste.org/learn/professional-development.aspx.
Prensky, M. (October 2001). Digital natives, digital immigrants. On the horizon, 9, 5.
Retrieved from http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/prensky%20-
%20digital%20natives,%20digital%20immigrants%20-%20part1.pdf.
.
TF – I. B / Create a blog that will serve as a teacher resource for helpful tips for teachers who want to stay up to date on current technological research. / June 2011 / 3
Reflection:As part of my master’s classes and my action research plan, I was prompted to create a blog to help share my thoughts and Ideas. This blog has turned into a place where I can offer thoughts and perspective on teaching with technology. As of late I have no added to much to it, although I am working toward a time where I can share my thoughts weekly with my colleagues. As Mark Prensky mentions, our students are more in tune with technology than we are and we should work hard to make sure we are learning techniques that align with their needs. (2001). As I work on making this blog a useful tool for other teachers, I will also be finding things that work for me, as a professional. I don’t see myself becoming a principal, but in the role of technology facilitator, I must certainly practice the skill of using the web to stay up to date. Using things like websites, RSS aggregates blogs and wikis; teachers can stay in touch easily with new, up and coming, technology for the classroom. In a recent article, Pennsylvania Democratic Sen. Bob Casey mentioned that students aren’t leaving high school prepared for jobs that they have to use computer technology (Fitzgerald, 2011). To me, this is the heart of the issue. Through this exercise, I have learned how to incorporate blogging into my profession and keep up to date for the students. This will help me become a better leader and stay in compliance with our district’s plan for professional development in technology. This plan states that teachers should be using current practices, and that is what I hope to provide for them (FBISD Technology Department, 2005).
Fitzgerald, S. (November 2, 2011). Sen. Casey calls for HS computer courses directive. Educational
Technology. Retrieved from http://people.uis.edu/rschr1/et/?p=3355.
FBISD Technology Department. (May 2005). Fortbend independent school district technology staff
development plan. Retrieved from fortbendisd.com
Prensky, M. (October 2001). Digital natives, digital immigrants. On the horizon, 9, 5.
Retrieved from http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/prensky%20-
%20digital%20natives,%20digital%20immigrants%20-%20part1.pdf.
Subtotal / 11
Brief Description of the Activity / Date Activity Completed / Internship Hours
Standard II. Planning and Designing Learning Environments and Experiences / TF-II.A / Create several units for the honors geometry team to use that incorporate the use of technology. / August 2011 / 4
Reflection:
As part of the National Educational Technology Standards for Students or NETS, teachers are required to provide experiences for students that help facilitate learning of technological skills. This is why, through Geometry, we try to connect students to technology that is applicable to Mathematics. Fort Bend ISD requires that we use technology in the classroom and so I have designed at least one lesson for each unit that allows kids to connect Geometry to technological visuals. (FBISD Technology Department, 2005). As David Prensky mentions, students in this day and age are digital natives and therefore respond better to this sort of learning that their parents or teachers generations do (2001). Being a younger teacher, I like to bring to the group my love of all things technological and try to push my colleagues to develop some new skills. Gloriana González and Patricio G. Herbst found during a research project that “students who used dynamic geometry software were more successful in discovering new mathematical ideas than when they used static, paper-based diagrams” (Ciciora, 2009). Through the use of programs like Geometers Sketchpad and Google Sketchup, I hope to achieve just that.
Ciciora, P. (Dec, 15 2009). Adding technology to geometry class improves opportunities
to learn. New Bureau Illinois. Retrieved on December 15, 2011 from
http://news.illinois.edu/news/09/1215math.html.
FBISD Technology Department. (May 2005). Fortbend independent school district technology staff
development plan. Retrieved from fortbendisd.com
Prensky, M. (October 2001). Digital natives, digital immigrants. On the horizon, 9, 5.
Retrieved from http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/prensky%20-
%20digital%20natives,%20digital%20immigrants%20-%20part1.pdf.
TF-II.B / Support my grade level team during team meetings with resources and research as we discuss innovative ways to integrate technology. / August 2011
October 2011 / 2
3
Reflection:
Part of becoming a technological educator means being aware of resources and sharing them with others. A great way to do this is through the use of an RSS aggregate and blogging. During the course of my master’s program I have been using Google Reader on the recommendation of Will Richardson in his article Merrily Down the Stream: RSS makes it easy to gather information. (2006). He recommends that using an RSS aggregate is a great way to organize articles in such a way that you can share them with colleagues. In order to become an effective administrator, it is most important to keep up to date on the newest ideas and this is something Richardson says is possible if you use an RSS aggregate (2006).
Another helpful tool to share my thoughts with my fellow grade level teachers is a blog. I keep one for my classes and also one for my master’s program to record my findings and interesting thoughts as they present themselves. Part of my action research plan for ED 5301 is to try to incorporate as much use of blogging and other web 2.0 tools as I can. These are all covered in another article by Richardson; where he goes on to mention how web 2.0 tools can be an effective way to increase productivity in the classroom (2004). These are all great ideas to get our digital native students to become more engaged in school (Prensky, 2001) and I plan to continue to share ideas with my team and lead them by example.
Prensky, M. (October 2001). Digital natives, digital immigrants. On the horizon, 9, 5.
Retrieved from http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/prensky%20-
%20digital%20natives,%20digital%20immigrants%20-%20part1.pdf.
Richardson, W. (2004). Blogging and RSS – That what’s it? Ad how to of powerful new web tools for
educators. Multimedia & Internet @ Schools, 11(1), 10-13.
Richardson, W. (2006). Merrily down the stream: RSS makes it easy to gather information. School Library
Journal. 52(7).
TF-II.C / Model the use of web 2.0 tools for a small group of teachers. / May 2011
October 2011 / 1
3
Reflection:
As I mentioned above, web 2.0 tools are a great way to keep kids interested in learning and to keep teachers on the cutting edge of educating. (Richardson, 2004). I have found my favorite tool to be my blog and I use it daily to help facilitate my classes. Just last year I was made a leader of a team of teachers and started blogging about my classes daily to help keep the kids interested in the course. Part of the reason I chose to do this through a blog is because I wanted to show teachers on my team that they could use an easy and effective new tool, in place of older or outdates methods of teaching kids. Mark Prensky says “Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (of a pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language” (2001, p.2) and furthermore are uncomfortable with old ways of communicating with their instructors. Based on this research, I have been sharing my thoughts about blogging with my department and a lot of them have started keeping classroom blogs as well! During these meetings I will demonstrate how to use the blog, show them mine and give them options for things they can post to help make their class run more effectively. I feel that as I progress in education, it should be my goal to share what I am learning with others in the hopes of progressing toward a more technologically centered educational philosophy. I’d like to see Blogging become a norm in school and not an exception. In fact, as Thomas Guskey mentions “we live in an age of accountability” (1998) and I think that we begin to evaluate teachers on different levels; use of technology should become part of that overall evaluation.
Guskey, T. R. (1998). The age of our accountability. Journal of Staff Development, 19(4), 36-44.
Prensky, M. (October 2001). Digital natives, digital immigrants. On the horizon, 9, 5.
Retrieved from http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/prensky%20-
%20digital%20natives,%20digital%20immigrants%20-%20part1.pdf.
Richardson, W. (2004). Blogging and RSS – That what’s it? Ad how to of powerful new web tools for
educators. Multimedia & Internet @ Schools, 11(1), 10-13.
TF-II.D / Research and post relevant articles to my blog about integrating technology into the math curriculum and encourage teachers to read and use the items found there. / October 2011 / 4
Reflection:
As part of my job as a team leader, I worked hard to share ideas and new technologies with my team members. I believe that “Technology is ubiquitous, touching almost every part of our lives, our communities, our homes” (Edutpoia, 2008). This sentiment means that as a learner and teacher, it is my job to work to help others understand the benefits of technology in the classroom. For a lot of my colleagues, this means shifting their entire thought process to become aligned with the 21st century student. As Mark Prensky brings up, digital natives need us to understand their way of thinking so we can become better learners ourselves (2001). I have found that “For many teachers, a lack of personal experience with technology presents an additional challenge. In order to incorporate technology-based activities and projects into their curriculum, those teachers first must find the time to learn to use the tools and understand the terminology necessary for participation in those projects or activities” (Starr, 2011). This is why I have been trying to share what knowledge I have found to make it easier for others to try new things in the classroom. This activity has taught me that as an educator I will always need to continue to grow and change and share with my peers. It has also taught me to use peers as a reference whenever I can. In the future I will focus on continuing to educate myself and others about ways to integrate technology into the classroom.
Edutopia. (March, 2008). Why integrate technology into the curriculum? The reasons are many. Edutopia.
Retrieved on July 6, 2012 from http://www.edutopia.org/technology-integration-introduction.
Prensky, M. (October 2001). Digital natives, digital immigrants. On the horizon, 9, 5.
Retrieved from http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/prensky%20-
%20digital%20natives,%20digital%20immigrants%20-%20part1.pdf.

Starr, L. (June, 2011). Integrating Technology in the Classroom: It Takes More Than Just Having Computers

Education World. Retrieved on July 6, 2012 from http://www.educationworld.com/a_tech/tech/tech146.shtml/.
TF-II.E / Lead a small group of teacher through implementation of software in their lessons. / August 2011