Monday, August 24, 2009

Balancing teaching and tech duties - meltdown

I feel like I'm walking a tight rope.

We've had some unexpected changes in our admin plus the construction at our campuses has delayed us from setting up our classrooms.

It's very stressful to say the least.

Today I received my schedule from one of the campuses which allotted me 90 minutes on Fridays to do weekly tech work. That didn't factor in a half hour after school after I did parking lot duty. So that gives me three hours total for tech work for 15 classrooms for the week plus any admin needs. (I'm only at this campus for three days out of the week.)

I had a meltdown.

With all the stress, it was bound to happen sometime but it happened during a meeting which really aggravated me. Like Tom Hanks said in "A League of Their Own", 'THERE'S NO CRYING IN BASEBALL!" Well, there's no crying in technology. Or at least I didn't think there was.

But there I was, leaving the room before everyone saw my reaction.

To their credit, the interim admin and some teachers threw in some last minute changes that may or may not happen to accommodate my schedule. If I'm excused from parking lot duty, that gives me another hour and a half during the week.

After the gushing tapered off, I could see some solutions that could work. I just have to find the time to work on the solutions. Ack!

If there are any tech coordinators passing through, how do you handle your technology and teaching responsibilities? (By the way, part of that time is spent training faculty/staff.)

Calgon! Take me away!

Monday, July 27, 2009

Student Safety with Technology

I have suggested a few technology tools this summer to the staff at my school such as Moodle and wikis to use in their teaching.

Tonight I received an email from a staff member questioning whether I was concerned "at all" about our students' safety while using these tools. This gave me pause because if there is one person wondering this, there could be more. I will repeat here the answer I have given her and the rest of our staff.

I definitely understand her concern because student (and staff) safety is one of my chief concerns when I investigate a specific technology tool. I have to admit that even though I recommend Twitter, it worried me at first because of the opportunity for creepy fellows (for a mild term) to send me disgusting posts. Fortunately, I found that I am able to make my posts private - available only to people I "allow" to follow me - and I am able to choose who I follow. It has made Twitter quite a valuable tool professionally for education and technology. (Of course, I use it only professionally and not to announce what I had for supper tonight which was a delicious Chicken Alfredo. LOL)

The Moodle program I am encouraging the teachers to use as a content delivery system is completely secure. Well, I won't say that anything is completely secure but someone can't just pop into your Moodle course without a username and password. Just try to get into one of our teacher's Moodle courses without a username or password. My Moodle site requires a "key" to enroll into my technology course.

The wikis that I suggested would best be used within their Moodle online courses as collaboration tools so they would be secure as well.

Yes, it is all very scary, but we cannot hide our heads in the sand and not teach technology because of this fear. Our students will use technology with our tutelage or without. My hope is that we can teach them how to use it productively.

It is a precarious position to encourage technology when there are major dangers out there. I promise that I will constantly be on guard to find ways to protect our students and staff.

I hope this reassures you too.

Friday, July 17, 2009

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Web Design at the Orlando Science Center

I took the easy way out this year. Actually, it wasn't the easy way out but it was one way to stay one step ahead of very bright 7th-9th graders.

I teach Web Design at the Orlando Science Center for their Summer Academy. Very exciting place. I love the people who work there because of their kindness and enthusiasm in teaching the young minds of our future scholars, businesspeople, scientists, etc. Somehow I was found worthy enough to build the curriculum for this week-long class.

The first two years, I focused on HTML and giving them the basics. But the basics are no longer satisfactory. Yes, I still gave them the basics with HTML and Notepad this year but we journeyed into other tools such as Joomla and a JimDo.

We only 3 days to build websites so it was a little challenging. This class really impressed me. I chose JimDo because of its ease as a WYSIWYG but I'm not sure if I should've. Lots of pressure to upgrade.

Well, I think it was a success. Check them out at bzmom3.jimdo.com

Friday, June 26, 2009

Using Moodle to build an SIS (or why bother?)

This week I had a breakthrough with a proposed Student Information System that I'm working on (that I've been asked to work on). We'll be adopting Moodle for our teacher pages this year. As I experiment with it to see how it will work for the teachers, I found much more uses for Moodle than just the teacher pages.

We could actually use it for a student information system (SIS). And it's open source - FREE!!

Moodle already has an attendance module but our district's Moodle doesn't have it so I provided a workaround. Using the database module, I was able to build a decent searchable attendance database. Our office could just pull up one page to get all the attendance information and can even edit it if an absent student turned up later.

With the success of the searchable attendance database, I considered how I might build a student database. Since Moodle is secure, this would be an ideal setup that could be accessed from anywhere there is an Internet connection. I was able to build a database that looked pretty good to me.

Here's my dilemma.

I'm totally psyched about Moodle and its capabilities. When I try to convey this excitement to some of my co-workers, they say they don't understand why I would put in the time and effort when there are commercial products available out there. I don't understand why they don't appreciate my efforts to save money for my schools. I am the Technology Coordinator, after all.

How do I react when I am proactive about improving technology for our school without spending a lot of money...but I get "shot down" with my efforts? And to top it off, these comments are from the very people who asked me to find an SIS for the schools!

Am I taking this too personal?

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Moodling with Mac

I've just started working with Macs this year and it's been quite a delight. Actually my very first computer was a Mac with a whopping 4MB of memory!

My schools use a combo of Windows and Mac computers so as the Technology Coordinator, I needed to get back up-to-date. Whoa Nelly! I've been missing out!

It felt a bit daunting last night as I downloaded Moodle4Macs 4 to my MacBook so that I could play with Moodle as an admin. Unlike Windows, the process was much smoother than expected. I didn't get to play as much as I wanted, though, before my head hit the keyboard at 1am so I'll be venturing further into this great new tool for education today.

Monday, June 22, 2009

Stuffit - arrgh!

Using WinZip in Windows is fairly easy if I just want to open a folder. So is Stuffit in Mac.

However, I'm having trouble getting the files to work properly after I've unzipped them with Stuffit. I had the same trouble with WinZip at first but then I figured it out. Maybe that's what will happen with Stuffit too.

Dealing with mySQL is proving to be a slight roadblock. I can't get into the database I created! Ack!

But therein lies the challenge of the learning curve. I'll come out of this on the other end knowing more than I did yesterday....once I figure it all out!

I'm so ready to set up my Joomla education template!

Sunday, June 21, 2009

Journey with Joomla

After the years of light (but laborious) web building, God has sent this wonderful tool called Joomla.

For someone that has a difficult time staying organized, it definitely looks like the answer to my prayers!

My summer will be filled with learning Joomla and using it as the tool to build our schools' websites!