Its Been One Week

I made a goal for myself to write a bit this year about my work, so here it goes.

I’m happy to say that, at least from my perspective, our first week at LCS was a fantastic success.  There were bugs, lots of them, with our LMS and scheduling, but we worked through them and I think we managed to get them all straightened out.  In the midst of it all, our staff remained positive, understanding and energetic. I feel like this year there’s an exceptional feeling of positivity in the air amongst our staff.  Its a great way to start the year.

I don’t think it was a typical week for me in this new position, but then again, I’m hoping there won’t be a typical week.  That’s one of the things I’m excited about as I head into this uncharted territory of Technology Integration Coach.  The week looked something like this:

I worked alongside the IT department to problem solve as we found issues from moving ManageBac, our LMS, into the new year.  This also meant serving as a liaison between teachers, admin and IT.  Everyone sees the issues in a slightly different way and I worked to help each side prioritise the issues and chipped in as I could in fixing problems.  While I’m hoping to move more towards the user side of MB and away from the set up and management, I do enjoy the puzzle of finding why the problems popped up and then trying to work out solutions.

One of the issues of an international school can be a lack of institutional knowledge when it comes to these issues.  We’ve had three different people responsible for this transition over the past three years, myself included last year.  As the dust settles next week, we’ll sit down and look at how to make the next year smoother.

The rest of my week was spent introducing sixth grade students to MB.  For some it was an overwhelming hour of password resets and creation, but in the end they were all successful.  It was a good reminder of the vast amount of information these kids are taking in during the first week.  I was fried by Friday, and I know they were too.

Finally, I got to step out of my technology role and do a little work with the same students on mindfulness.  I love the idea of mindfulness in schools and helping students develop those tools.  Our elementary counselor has done a fabulous job laying the foundation for them in the ES and I hope to be able to continue the work over the year.  It would not only help the students find some balance in their days, but provide a nice balance for me as well.

I’m looking forward to seeing what next week brings.  I’ve already got a parent meeting at 7:30 Monday morning to talk about parental controls on a Mac and I get to promote our Google Educator Certification initiative Monday afternoon.  Seems like a pretty good set of bookends to start the week.