Monday, July 11, 2011

Thoughts On Day 1

I'm excited by the prospect of improving my knowledge of ways in which I can increase the use of technology in my building especially given the impacted nature of the student population.  Based upon the few staff I've spoken with motivating and engaging students seems to be a recurrent theme. It would seem ripe for an infusion of technology into the curriculum to bring this about.

Being new to the building I don't really have an accurate picture of what the technology scene looks like throughout the building,  the skills possessed by the staff, their technology needs, the students' skills, their needs, etc.  I do sense from the few walk abouts that I've done that the building's technology infrastructure that students have access to is dangerously close to being obsolete. There's one fairly up to date lab, but it drops off rapidly from there. It's one thing to get excited by the possibilities that technology can bring to instruction, but its' quite another to make it happen when the resources don't exist to support it.

Given my new responsibility for technology throughout the building it is very important for me to get up to speed on the possibilities it holds for our staff. Increasing my knowledge of what's possible is critical to my success in developing a plan for updating infrastructure within the building that supports greater integration of technology into instruction.

I'm excited to see what the rest of the week brings.

2 comments:

  1. Rhett, You will need to be creative in how to address the technology level of your building. We found starting with items for teachers helped them become more comfortable with moving to other devices for students. Best of luck!!

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  2. The gap between resources and potential can indeed be frustrating. I think one of the reasons that we struggle getting our teachers to use technology more is that we often show them the latest and greatest tools, and then they try to make them work on hardware that is woefully behind. It definitely requires improving the physically and knowledge capacity simultaneously. Best of luck!

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