May+2011

Monthly Activity Reflection
May 2011 Standards VIII-A, VIII-C, VIII-D As we do every year we have one more meeting of the Technology Task Force to wrap up the year and plan for the next school year. We take the STAR chart information, budget information from the Superintendent, and decisions made in the April meeting to make adjustments to the district Technology Plan. We have been doing an annual technology plan and we discussed changing to a three year plan instead. Before the meeting was over we decided not to change from a one year plan to a three year plan. We decided that keeping up to the minute on technology needs is better than writing a three year plan and then having something change that will affect the technology plan. Again our district participated in the online field testing for TAKS. I assisted the Technology Apps teacher in preparing her computer lab for the testing and helped administer the test. We remembered some of the issues we had in 2010 so we were prepared, we thought, for all of the students scheduled to take the test. At the end of the first day a student comes and asks why we did not call for any of the students in the class she was in. Oops, seems the person responsible for giving us the names of the students missed one of the classes. So we scheduled them for another day. After that, all of the students scheduled for the test completed the assessment. The test this year went smoother because we remembered what we went through last year to provide enough computers for the test. I learned that you have to keep a cool head when working with technology because it does not always work like you want it to when you want it to. I will be able to use that little tidbit when I work with impatient teachers in the future.