My day started with a little bit of time on the Elementary School playground. It is the end of peace week here at LCS and the elementary students were performing a
song for peace that included supporting peaceful elections here in Ghana. Almost all of the 300+ students had on their house color shirts and sang with hearts full of love. I cannot think of a better way to start a day. There will be video soon, but for now my favorite moment is here in the pic.
We’re in a transition year with an interim head of school and the search for a permanent replacement in full swing. That’s not slowing us down from moving forward though. This week our admin, IT department, media specialist and tech integrationist all sat down together to start working on a path forward. Its messy, but its exciting.
My first task in the midst of all of this is to lead our Technology and Library/Media Services (TELMS) committee in updating our technology philosophy. Its an exciting task as we set the tone for what we want to see in the development of tech integration here at my school.
Personally, I think we are on the right path at the moment, but we need to make sure that we are all on it together. Getting our tech philosophy and plan updated and shared with our staff will certainly be a great first step.
I’m also excited that I’ve gotten requests from two teachers in the past week to join their classes for help with technology tasks. I’ve started strongly encouraging staff to use youcanbookme to schedule time with me. So far its been successful and I think it is a great way to ease staff into using their calendars more efficiently .
As a result, I’ve spent time this week investigating both how to create digital graphic novel pages as well as graph lab results with varying standard deviations in the results. Ok, I’m still working on that last one, and I’m not sure I’m using the correct terminology, but the teacher I’m working with seemed please with our results so far. Its such a rewarding feeling to sit with a teacher, learn together and then encourage them to build their confidence in their technology usage. Our goal for this particular teacher is for her to create screen casts of the process for her students to reference outside of class.
Things are rolling along and getting busier by the day. Some days it can be intimidating, but its all a positive challenge. I still love this job and the randomness of each day’s challenge.
Ryan Harwood 