Heidelberg's Integrating Technology Site

This has been an extremely hectic week so I have not made as much progress on my GAME plan as I had planned (Cennamo, Ross, & Ertmer, 2009). My superintendent suffered a heart attack but luckily we managed to get him to the hospital before he went into total cardiac arrest. It was certainly a reminder about the dangers of stress. Anyway, due to the domino effect at the Superintendent’s office, I had several additional tasks added to my plate.

I did meet with my small Intranet development team on Monday morning for about an hour but the entire time was spent configuring Dreamweaver and the Intranet sites. Here are my latest thoughts on my plan for increasing my proficiency with eductional technology:

Are you finding the information and resources you need?

I was unable to film any other ET/educator collaboration this week although I did meet with a video instructor at one of my schools. This educator suggested that I create a video teacher resource page on my Intranet so that tips and suggestions can be easily shared among that group of educators.

The more I think about it, the more I want to make sure that the resources and links that I make available on the Heidelberg Integrating Technology Site (HITS) are useful. So many educational sites I visit have numerous links but many of the resources are not helpful or go to sites that require paid subscriptions.

The main intranet sections I am currently working on are:

Webquests

Concept Mapping

Electronic Portfolios

Internet Literacy

Blog and Wikis

Video Production

Online Tutorials

Project/Problem Based Learning

Assessment with Technology

If you know of any web resources that you regularly use or find particularly useful in any of these areas, please share them with me.

Do you need to modify your action plan?

I am receiving positive feedback about my plan for a technology integration intranet site from educational technologists and educators so I think it is going to be larger than I had first envisioned.

What have you learned so far?

While researching for some of the additional resources for this week, I discovered an article about the Moodle resource. The Consortium for School Networking article (2008) described the features of this free learning management software and I see numerous applications for this tool in my district.

What new questions have arisen?

I am still struggling with how best to organize the information on the intranet website so that it is useful for educators. I have looked at numerous educational resource websites and often there are so many hyperlinks that it becomes overwhelming and difficult to find the resources that are truly beneficial. I think for this Intranet site I will only include links to resources that educators have utilized with their students. In fact, eventually it would be nice to include a short video of the technology being utilized by the teacher and students along with the resource link.

References:

Cennamo, K., Ross, J. & Ertmer, P. (2009). Technology integration for meaningful classroom use: A standards-based approach (Laureate Education custom edition). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.

Consortium for School Networking, W. (2008). CoSN K12 Open Technologies Implementation Study #3. Moodle: An Open Learning Content Management System for Schools. Consortium for School Networking, Retrieved from ERIC database.