I am guilty of never having articulated Technology Vision Statement for myself personally or for my media center.  The closest I’ve come is that I want to be known at my school as the “How to Integrate Technology (and media resources) into the Curriculum” specialist, not the “Change the Laminating Film and Come Hook Up My Printer Cable” specialist.  (And believe me, this is an uphill battle, much more so than I expected when I started this job last year!)  So I guess I thought Jeff was going to do my thinking for me and talk about Technology Visions, and I could just piggyback off of his Dreams for a Technology Utopia.  What he presented was much less mystical, much more practical. 

Jeff is the guy who is responsible for planning and implementing actual technology projects involving hardware, software, ongoing maintenance, budgeting, communicating with board members and administrators, professional development opportunities for users, and ongoing as well as final assessment of success.  Whew!  I feel exhausted just thinking about it.  The project he’s currently immersed in is putting 5,000 Promethean boards into classrooms, training teachers not only to use them but also to troubleshoot their own technical difficulties (!), and demonstrating that their usage (they have 3,000 boards in place so far) is having a positive effect on student engagement and achievement.  Technology dreams?  Sounds more like a nightmare to me!

So Jeff is all about reality.  He took us step-by-step through how to plan for every aspect of a technology project, no matter how large or small.  He shared his early failures and his current successes with us, giving concrete examples of each.  He outlined each phase of the process, starting with approval from administrators and early buy-in from stakeholders, and ending with plans to continue building on what you originally accomplished.  He even offered some strategies for bringing curriculum zealots and IT nazis together to work in harmony!  Now that does sound like a dream!

If you’d like to learn more, visit Jeff’s website, where he shares his presentations and handouts, his training manuals and tutorials, and some “Cool Websites” that he finds valuable. 

Now, I still need to do my own thinking about technology.  After all, the first part of the session title states, “I Know Where I Want to Be….”  Do I?  I believe it’s time to do some more reflecting on just what it means to be the Technology Integration Specialist at my school, and what steps I can take to accomplish that.  How about you?  I’d love to hear your thoughts on how it all fits together.

The first session I attended Thursday morning was an overview of some free Google apps.  The main reason I attended this session was to learn more about the Google calendar, which I’ve been considering using for scheduling the laptop computers and the Media Lab computers at my school.  I’ve heard other media specialists praise it on the SCASL listserv, so I wanted to find out more about it.  I like the fact that my invited users can edit it themselves, because I’d like my teachers to be able to put themselves on the schedule rather than emailing me or worse, sending me notes on little pieces of paper asking if the computers are available.  This is one of the things I love to see technology used for – removing the drudgery of clerical tasks from my daily life.  With my Google Computer Calendar in place, I will no longer have to spend time keeping up with those schedules myself.

What was unexpected in this session was discovering Google Sites, which allows users to quickly create websites that can be made private, semi-public (by invitation only) or public to everyone on the internet.  I like the fact that my pages can be kept in a controlled environment (sometimes necessary in the world of education), but the thing that surprised me about the Google Sites pages our presenter, Karen Minter, has created is that they are ad-free.  I didn’t realize that Google ever refrained from promoting themselves, but according to Karen they do not run ads on educator-created websites.  This was good news, because I really tend to shy away from using sites that run ads of any sort.  After all, if my name is on a webpage, I want to be able to control all of the content that appears there.  (Collaborative work with colleagues excepted, of course.) 

For example, I heard about a new webpage aggregator site called Only2Clicks that displays a full-page-view snapshot of all the sites you have stored there.  This was exactly what I was looking for to use with a project I was doing for my teachers, and when I took a look at the site, I loved the design and the layout of it.  However, there were those rows of little Google ads showing up at the bottom of each 2Clicks page, so I reluctantly decided to stick with using my Netvibes aggregator for the project, even though with Netvibes, the link modules are much smaller and harder to read than those on Only2Clicks, and the Netvibes webpage modules show only the top left corner of a website, rather the the entire webpage.  (See an example of what I’m talking about here.)  Hmmm, now that I think about it, perhaps I should take another look at Pageflakes to see how they handle website views.  If anyone out there is using Pageflakes, maybe you could leave me a comment and let me know…..

Boy, I really got sidetracked from describing my EdTech experience, didn’t I!  It’s getting late, and I think this post is long enough; I’ll report on some more sessions later.

Update: 11/11/08  Well, I did try to go back and take another look at Pageflakes, but the site is down, and apparently has been down for at least two weeks.  After doing some research, I’ve found that there is rampant speculation on the web that Pageflakes is gone for good.  Due to financial difficulties, Pageflakes was acquired by Live Universe in May of this year, and the general web consensus at this time is that the faltering company will not resurface.  Too bad.   

My first session today was on using Web 2.0 tools at the elementary level, where I got a few interesting ideas for using some of the apps I’ve been learning about in the SCASL 23 Things program.  The presenter, Anne-Marie Wilcox, also recommended a website that I’m anxious to explore called Jenuine Tech (created by Jennifer Wagner) which offers technology integration projects that teachers can use in their classrooms.  The coincidental thing about this is that I just discovered Jennifer’s blog, Tech Thoughts by Jen, last week and was so impressed by it that I added it to my Netvibes blog feed page! 

The other session I attended was entitled “50 Ways to Use ETVStreamlineSC.”  Okay, we didn’t really have time for 50 uses, but our presenter (Debbie Jarrett) certainly gave us quality, if not quantity.  Anyone who is only using the videos from this site is missing out on some great resources.  If you haven’t checked out the “Teacher Center” at the ETV Streamline website yet, you’ll be surprised and pleased with what’s available.  If you’d like a digital copy of the information handout I received in this session, just email me (junel@sumter17.k12.sc.us) and I’ll be glad to send it to you.

Time for bed now, but I’ll be up early tomorrow for another day of learning and growing!

It’s easy to be wowed by all the flashy 2.0 applications that are out there.  It’s easy to get so caught up in exploring all the “cool tools” that I neglect to spend time implementing what I’m learning in my media center program.  And what’s worse, it’s easy to start a project like a blog or a wiki or a podcast and then fail to maintain it.

For example, ever since I learned about Google Book Search in August, I have been using it to keep a list of all the books from the Alice Drive Elementary Library collection that I’ve read since I started teaching at the school last year. It’s linked from my media center webpage so that my students can see what I’m reading and hopefully find something they’d like to check out. I realized today that I haven’t posted any new titles in over a week!  This is partly because lately I’ve spent more time with the computer than with a book, and partly because I just haven’t taken the time to add the books I did read.  Will the kids notice I haven’t added anything new this week?  Probably not. But it’s a slippery slope when you start to let those projects slide.

So I guess this blog post is really more of a reflection on the need to keep my technology priorities straight, rather than a description of my experience with Delicious.  But that’s okay; it’s just part of sharing The View From Here.

For example, I knew I wanted to start a systematic technology training program for my teachers this year, and my original plan was just to communicate with them via email.  It was the SLJ Blog Thing that led me to create a blog – Technology Teasers for Teachers – to organize and disseminate the information I knew my teachers would need.

Thanks to everyone at SCASL who has worked and is working so hard to provide these tutorials!  Your time and effort is greatly appreciated!