latishalowery

Final Video Presentation Final Report Annotated Bibliography SMART Board Training

September 13 For this internship, I am focusing on developing and updating SMART board tutorials for my school. Previous to this year, we only had six SMART boards in our school. Those boards were for the 4 year old kindergarten program, the 5 year old kindergarten program and the developmentally delayed program. Over the summer, every classroom teacher had a SMART board installed in their rooms and the teachers in grades 3-5 were given Macbook Pros. Unfortunately, when the SMART boards where installed, many of them were not installed properly. So in my first two meetings with my mentors, Melanie Wyndham and Lisa Fisher, we discussed how we were going to work together to get the SMART boards connected in every classroom. Mrs. Wyndham and I developed a sign-up sheet for teachers who needed extra help with the setup of the boards. For the 3rd-5th grade teachers, we encountered some setbacks because the goal was to connect the board to the Macs. When we met to set them up we realized we needed to order dongles in order for us to get the connection. At this point the dongles have been ordered and we are waiting for them to come back. Temporarily, we connected the SMART boards to the old PCs the teachers already had. Once all the SMART boards were connected in the school, we found that many teachers were having problems with orientation and other basic elements of using the SMART board. At this point, I am working on an assessment to find out the needs of the teachers and how basic these trainings should be. Mrs. Fisher is our district's technology coach, and she is working to get me old handouts for the SMART board trainings that the district has used in the past. Due to the fact that she is only at my school on Tuesdays, she has not gotten those to me yet. In the meantime, the assessment that I am working on will be distributed to the teachers at next Monday's faculty meeting so I can get a true picture of what I am working with.

September 27 Over the past two weeks, I have been working to gain an understanding of the true needs in my school. I have also been collaborating with the technology coach in my school to gather old handouts and resources from prior SMART board trainings to aid me in the development of the video resources that I will be creating. One beneficial resources I was led to was the handouts on the [|SMART board] website. In the resources section of the SMART board website, I found several handouts and video tutorial for trainings. These were very good but they were not specific enough to meet the needs of the teachers in my school. From these resources, my goal is to integrate essential elements from each to create SMART board videos/tutorials that will be beneficial for all faculty and staff members at my school.

Once I had resources that I could pull from, I went back to the survey that I sent to all teachers at the beginning of my internship so I could specify the needs. Unfortunately, only six teachers completed the survey. Although I only had six responses, I gained a wealth of knowledge from the survey. Everyone who completed the survey indicated that they have attended a SMART board training through the district, but none of them were pleased with the training. Many stated that they did not learn anything. One teacher commented that she doesn’t know how to turn on the board even after two hours of training. Luckily, according to the survey, all of the teachers are open to more training. media type="custom" key="7025567" I knew at the beginning of internship that many teachers in my school really struggle with technology, but from the results of the survey I now understand the extent. I am re-evaluating how much content I will put into each tutorial. At this point my plan is to create a series of video tutorials.

Video 1: SMART Board hardware basics Video 2: SMART Board interactive basics Video 3: SMART board interactive whiteboard tools Video 4: Helpful tricks for using your SMART Board Video 5: How to create a SMART Board Lesson and other interactive games

My plan is to begin working on the first video this week so I can present it to my mentor in next Tuesday’s meeting to ensure that she is pleased and I am working in the right direction.

October 11: Midterm Report



October 25 Since the midterm report, I have made lots of progress on my videos. I have created the skeleton or an outline for all of my videos. To create the videos, I used the record option on the SMART board but some of the audio did not come out clear. My next step in completing the tutorials is to edit these videos using the I-Movie software but one setback is the fact that I may have to re-record some of my videos to ensure that the audio portion is of high quality.

I have not had the opportunity to collaborate with the technology coach in my school much because she only comes to our school once a week and she has had conferences and other obligations on the days that she is scheduled to come to my school. Lately, I have been relying on the media specialist in my school and other teachers to provide feedback on their needs and my progress. Many teachers are very excited to see the final project, but at this point I am backtracking to create handouts so that all teachers will have another resource to rely on when they are having difficulty with their SMART boards. By the next reflection, I should have the screenshots done and the outline for the tutorial handouts completed.


 * November 8 **

At one point in the internship, I felt as if I was falling behind on the development of my tools. In my last reflection I stated that I had created video tutorials, but some of the audio was of bad quality. This was a little discouraging for me because this set me back a lot. So I decided that I would redo the videos and focus on only one video at a time to ensure that I created valuable SMART board tutorial tools. At this point, I have completed the first video, SMART board hardware basics, and I am currently working on the next video, SMART board interactive basics. My goal is to complete all of the videos by the end of this week so I can present them to the technology team in my school at the next meeting which is scheduled for November 16. I have completed most of the tutorial packet that will accompany the video tutorials. In the packet, my goal was to personalize it to meet the needs of the teachers in my school, for example in the section on downloading the SMART Board Software; I included the product key information that’s specific to our school. I also included a picture of what their screen should look like during this process. Throughout my handout, I included many images to aid the learner the visual learners. When I began this process, my goal was to take screen shots from my computer to include in the packet, but as I began the process, I found that some of the same images were already online. So I decided to use those resources and site were I found them at the end of my packet. Additionally, I used some examples from other school districts and the SMART technology site to guide me in creating this product. I sited these sources as well. Check out the file below to view my training packet.


 * November 22 **

Wow, the past two weeks have been extremely difficult for me and the faculty and staff in my school. There has been rumors that our school would be closing down and we will be split between two others schools. Well, this past week those rumors were addressed by the administrators in my district, and it is a possibility that this will be one of the options to save money for next school year. As you could imagine this is all that teachers can think of at this point in the year. Some teachers are trying to figure out other options to save ours school and other teachers are worried that they may not have a job. With all of that said, my plan to formally share my SMART board tutorials with the faculty and staff in my school has gone out of the window. Last week's faculty meeting addressed the rumors and I was unable to share my information at that meeting. This week because of the Thanksgiving holiday we did not have a faculty meeting scheduled. After talking to my site supervisors, they suggested creating a public site where teachers could visit the tutorials at their leisure so I decided to create a wikispace to organize my training material. Our plan is to email the teachers the link and allow them to go through it at their own pace. At this point, I am still working on uploading the videos to youtube, which is taking forever, and making the wikispace visually appealing. Teachers will be emailed the link on Monday December 29 for them to explore. In the wiki, I have also created a survey for teachers to provide me with feedback to make the SMART board training better. Hopefully through everything that’s going on, teachers will make the efforts to visit my wiki and offer feedback. My supervisor did complement me on the creation of the tutorials and she did confirm that they would definitely be used next year within the district.

http://gipsmartboardtraining.wikispaces.com/

**November 29**

Final Annotated Bibliography