December 5-9

The SMART Response clickers keep on popping up. As soon as you think you've seen the last of them, the materials person finds some more boxes stuffed in a warehouse! Once again, this week I worked on taking out all those little screws, putting in the batteries, adding labels, for all 30 clickers, for all 12 sets. Our district is notorious for finding materials months after they were sent. However, I've gotten pretty fast at doing it. Also, I helped classroom teachers set up their SMART Response systems. The lower elementary grades didn't receive clickers until a couple months after the higher grades so they didn't get training. Since I've been using mine for awhile, I've been working with different teachers and helping them get started using this system. Next week I will continue working on this.

November 28 - December 2

This week I worked on setting up our assessment programs for our school-wide mid-year assessments. Two of these assessments are done on the computer. Teacher classes have to be set up and students enrolled in the program before attempting to give the assessment. Teachers will need to have the assessments completed before Christmas break. Mike showed me how to get into these programs with the administrative password, create teacher classes, and add students. I worked on getting students into the system so testing can start. Since we have new teachers at our school, I went to their classrooms to show them what tests they would be giving, how to log into the system, gave them their passwords, showed them how to view the results, and how to print reports.  

November 21-22

This week we only had school Monday and Tuesday due to fall break. On Monday, I was sent to a meeting at another school which lasted the entire day. On Tuesday students only came a couple hours and teachers attended district wide training for the rest of the day. So, needless to say, I wasn't able to do anything this week. 

November 14-18

I've been interested in learning how to connect and set up technology devices such as printers and projectors. In the past, when I came back from summer break my computer equipment had been disconnected and I always had to call our technology person to help me figure out which cords go where. I know how to hook up the computer and printer alone, but once you start adding other things like projectors, Elmos, and SMART Boards I get confused and have never had the opportunity to learn these simple skills. Since this would be my job duty if I decided to apply for an E.T. position one day, I figured what better time to learn this than now. Last week I expressed an interest in learning about this when talking to Mike so he taught me how to connect these devices this week. After learning, I was able to apply my new knowledge by removing some unwanted projectors and Elmos from teachers' classrooms. We sent an email out asking teachers to let us know if they weren't using their Elmos or projectors.Since we all have SMART Boards and no one needs a projector anymore, after I removed them from the classrooms, I put them in storage. Also, I removed Elmos from the classrooms that teachers no longer wanted. A few teachers responsed and said they wanted the Elmos. I was able to set up one classroom with an Elmo. I am glad I got to work on this throughout the week. Now I am able to make the "service runs" to remove or connect the different equipment.

November 7-11

Well, I was wrong about the SMART Response clickers. Our E.T. came to my room and thought maybe I had 14 classroom sets of clickers in my room from where I had been putting them together. I told him I didn't have any because as soon as I was done with a set, I traded it for another. We weren't sure where the other 14 sets were. We had to back track to see if we had passed them out to classroom teachers already. When the systems were shipped, they were placed in the warehouse behind our school. Our E.T. found that 14 sets had not been brought in to the school yet. So of course, I worked on putting the other 14 sets together. I still didn't get done, but hopefully we counted right and there will not be ANY more after these! :)

October 31 - November 4

This week was a continuation of last week. I worked on getting the SMART Response Clickers ready for classroom teachers to use. Last week, I thought I was working on putting together the last shipment of classroom sets. However, that was only the first shipment. Each set has 32 clickers that needs batteries and have to be labeled. This is all I worked on all week. I'm pretty quick with a screwdriver now! I think I'm down to the last couple sets, but I'm not positive if that was the last shipment. Every classroom teacher in our school will get their own set instead of having to share with their grade level teams.

October 24-29

This week was more about SMART Board issues. A replacement SMART Board was finally delivered this week. When SMART Boards were initially installed in the all the classrooms at the beginning of the year, a company was contracted for the installation. Now, it's the school's responsibility. This board had already been mounted at the beginning of the year so it seemed to be a quick install fix. Right before the board was starting to be installed, our ET realized the board is not the same size. They sent a smaller board than the previous. When talking to the company on the phone and explaining the situation, we figured it must be pretty cheap for them to make these boards. Instead of shipping the board back and them sending the correct board, they told us to keep it. This is probably because a person has to deliver each board when it's shipped or received. We also got the SMART Response system for our lower grades. This is SMART Board clicker system that students use to take tests with. All of these clickers had to have batteries installed and labeled before distributed to classrooms.  This does take awhile since you have 20 remotes for each class and the screws has to be taken out before you can insert the batteries. I know I will be working on this next week too.

October 17-22

This week I finished doing inventory on all the computers in my school. This took a lot of time since we have 5 different buildings that makes up our school. Also, I wanted to make sure I came when students were gone so I wouldn't disrupt anyone. I spent the rest of my time helping teachers with different technology problems (Smart board being unplugged, how to scan documents as a PDF email attachment through the copy machine, etc.).

October 10-15

This week we had no school due to fall break!!!!

October 3-7

This week I did more inventory, but this time I had to do inventory on all the computers in our school. I was able to learn the coding system used to identify the computers. For example, MES146X means it's a student computer in room 146 at Marshall Elementary. This year we have a new E.T. at our school. Our previous E.T. had been at been in the position for many years. Many of the computers were either in different rooms or not documented on the information our new E.T. received. He thinks this is because our previous E.T. didn't have to write this information down since she had been there so many years and remembered which computers she replaced or switched between rooms. I found many computers that were supposed to be in a certain room were not there and other rooms had more computers than what was listed on the inventory record sheet. In these cases, I made notes of which computers were missing and wrote down all the computer identification labels for the extra computers located in classrooms. Doing inventory on all the computers is a big task especially since many rooms have over eight computers. Also, we are a big elementary school. I will be finishing this job when I return back to school from fall break.

September 26-30

This week I worked on the program Aspen. This is the database our district uses for keeping student information such as contact information, student records, transcripts, and attendance information. We started using this in August. We got a quick 30 minute training on how to post attendance, but that's as far as it went. When students are withdrawn from school, teachers are required to post grades into the system. Our school had scheduled a training for this at the end of the week. However, students were being withdrawn before the training was provided. To help with this problem, Mike (E.T.) taught me how to post grades into the system. I went around to different classrooms and taught teachers how to post grades for those who had students who were moving earlier this week. At the end of the week, Mike trained the rest of the staff on how to post grades into Aspen. I helped throughout the training by walking around and helping teachers who came in late or missed a few steps along the way. I'm sure I will be doing this again next week because I figure some will forget by now and then!

September 19-23

This week we do a lot of problem solving with trying to determine what’s wrong with all the broken SMART boards (SB) in our schools. I have a SB that’s not working so I was involved in the whole process of contact the SB people and figuring out what was wrong with it. The SMART board company didn’t ship the boards directly to our school. We contracted a company to check all the SBs to make sure they were working properly when received from the company and ship them to our schools. If there was equipment lost or broken after the contracted company signed for the order, then SMART board company wouldn’t be responsible. This is why we had to figure out what was wrong instead of just calling and having new boards shipped. 

When you turn my board on, the cursor stays in one place. You can’t drag it around the board. We were told to calibrate the board again. This was not the issue. Since we can’t install or uninstall programs at our schools, the technology office personnel for our district came to check out the board. They thought there might be problems with the software or drivers on my computer. They decided to uninstall and reinstall on my computer and on a second computer. The board still had the same problem when hooked to both computers, so the problem wasn’t with the board.  When looking on my computer, the mouse moved fine and the software worked properly, it just wasn’t showing on the board. This led us to check the USB port. To check if this was the issue, we had to take a working USB port from another SB and replace it on my SB. This also didn’t make it work. Next, we decided to check out the SC9 unit (the touching mechanism). Again, we had to take apart from someone else’s board and try it out on mine.  After trying all these things, we didn’t know anything else to do. One of the technicians that installed the boards over the summer came to look at the board. He discovered the board must have been damaged when it was installed or delivered. If you look at the board in a certain angle in the right lighting, you can barely see where the board was hit. This made perfect sense as to why the cursor wouldn’t move and always stayed at the top of the part. Because of the dent, the SB thinks someone is touching it. That’s the reason why the cursor wouldn’t move from the damaged part. After all that, we finally have a shipment date for my new board. Now I’m just curious to see how long it will take for the people to come install it!  

September 12-16

This week I worked with my school's Educational Technologist (E.T.), Mike, to review some of the job duties that comes with the job. I looked at how he communicates with other E.T.'s in the district about solving technology problems and how he accesses the help requests. Our district has a program called Help Desk. This is where teachers enter information into a computer form about any technology issues they are having (projector won't turn on, password resets, etc.). Most of the time the tech people can fix these issues from their office, but in some cases our E.T. will address the issue. Also, the E.T.s are responsible for the inventory on all technology in the school. He had to get the serial numbers from all the SMART boards and projectors from all the classrooms. I decided to do this task for him. It was pretty interesting because the projectors are mounted to the front of the SMART boards and most of the boards can't be lowered. Since I'm barely 5 feet tall, I had to get a ladder to see the serial numbers. Since the ladder weighed about as much as I do, I got creative and used three egg crates stacked to reach the top. This was much easier than dragging a huge ladder around all the different buildings!

September 5-9

This week I basically discussed this practicum with my school's educational technologist. We got a schedule worked out so I can meet the three hour requirement. Since Monday was a holiday, it was a bit of a crazy week. Last Friday we were informed we would have a technology training on SMART boards sometime this week. Our school was given four subs for the training. We had to come up with a schedule that would allow all 60 teachers to attend training in a two day time frame. I attended the training sessions and assisted our ET. We had to make sure the appropriate software was loaded on all computers and all hardware components were working and set up. I thought the training was great. Everyone seemed to enjoy it and thought it provided a lot of good information.