TamiLenker

1. Final Presentation 2. Final Reflection 3. Annotated Bibliography 4. Time sheets 5. Google Apps for Education Wiki 6. [|Final Student Survey] 7. Responses to Student Survey 8. Final Teacher Survey 9. Responses to Teacher Survey

My Reflections

Overview:
Richland School District Two is attempting to make technology a priority. The district reports 15,125 computers and 1,834 Smartboards for its 24,331 students. Richland School District Two's Blythewood High school opened in 2005 with state of the art technology including Smartboards in every classroom, two rolling laptop carts for each of the four houses, and a 25 computer lab in the Cyber Center. As of August 30, 2010 there are 2086 students enrolled, 146 teachers, and 43 staff members. Despite the equipment, teachers and students are often frustrated with technology and only a small percentage of teachers actually use technology for instruction in meaningful ways. For the 2010-2011 school year, the district English/ Language Arts Coordinator, David Foster, has asked each high school to standardize their writing requirements and to make writing a major focus on all English classes. Each student should write a total of six essays in each of their four years of high school. English teachers need a tool to help them evaluate and organize these papers. During the internship, I will develop and refine my skills, knowledge and ability to: • Develop a Google App web page for student and teacher use • Develop a marketing plan that will motivate the use of Google Apps • Explore the organizational tools in Google Apps • Develop instructional videos and handouts for Google Doc training • Design Google Doc training for use with the district writing initiative • Evaluate effectiveness of training through teacher/ student surveys and observation Annotated Bibliography:

November 22
The Google Apps integration continues to go well. Word is spreading and teachers ask nearly every day for information. I think that the students are spreading the word more than any teacher. One student asked me if his English teacher from last year was using Google Apps yet and I told him she was not. She was one of the hold outs. He said, "Ill talk to her. "

This same student has become quite an expert. He wants me to roll out more of the Apps besides Google Docs. I asked him to help teach other students to use Google Docs and he has been invaluable. He sat and helped many of them by using the chat feature in Gmail.

One of the problems I have encountered is just getting people to use the wiki. At first, when teachers asked questions I answered each one individually but now I refer them to the wiki. I feel like it is easy to navigate and quick to pin point answers. I will continue to add pages as needs arise. For example, there are some glitches with Apps as with any software. I think that I may add a glitch page. I'm not sure what I will call it maybe "troubleshooting." I am hoping to get teachers comfortable enough to add to the wiki with ideas, handouts and lessons. I thought a troubleshooting page where they can post problems might make them more comfortable. One problem, for instance, is the inability to cut and paste between some applications. Most of the time control "c" and control"v" work but not everyone is familiar with that short cut. Docs also freezes on occasion and the cursor disappears. This problem is remedied by simply refreshing the page.

Another time consuming problem this week was creating groups. I mentioned this function to a teacher and he asked if I could create groups for his classes. The only way to create groups is to type in each student's name. Only an administrator can create a group, so I have to make them all. I need to look into this and see if there is a way to give teachers access to group creation. Once we open this to the entire school that could become a full-time job.

Right now I am working on surveys for teachers. I have sent some surveys to students but I want to create one for teachers to help me to improve the usability of the wiki. At this point I am no longer concerned about whether or not people will want to use the Apps. I am fairly sure that Google Apps is here to stay, but now I want to work on ways to adjust and sharpen the tutorials and help materials. In the meantime, I am anxiously awaiting the mobile apps due out this week. With these new apps users can create documents on their phones and handhelds. I hope to add tutorials for the mobile app as it comes available.

November 8
I am now in the Implementation stage of the ADDIE process. The Implementation stage, however, means that I am constantly revisiting the Design and Development stage. This internship is beginning to feel like a full time job as I am constantly stopped in the halls to field questions and I am receiving emails 7 days a week. I am enjoying it and I am excited that so many students and teachers are enthusiastic.

//Teacher Training//: As outlined in my proposal I am piloting the program with our English teachers but I have had interest from other teachers. Two social studies teachers have asked for usernames (one attended training), a geometry teacher attended one of the training sessions (but I think he only wanted a brownie) and our two librarians attended training.

The teachers fall into four categories—
 * The enthusiastic teachers: These teachers jumped right in and are using the Docs applications for much of their writing assignments.
 * The noncommittal teachers: These teachers are dabbling by sharing documents or opening essays in Google Docs, but they are not ready to completely make the switch.
 * The cautious teachers: These teachers want to use Google Apps, but they are afraid to. Most in this category just do not have the time to dedicate to the initial training or they are uncomfortable with technology. I even had one teacher say that she wished the freshman teachers would teach their students the ins and out of the application and then she could use it with her students without having to waste time teaching them how to use it.
 * The antis: These teachers are just plain **anti**-technology. I do not know what to say about them except that I hope they will change their minds one day soon--either that or quit teaching.

In my needs analysis I realized that one of the biggest obstacles would be getting the teachers to a training session. I scheduled training sessions at staggered times so that every teacher could attend if they desired and I offered to come in during their classes to help them as they tried the applications for the first time with their students. I was a little frustrated with one teacher that said she wanted to attend a training session at the end of the day. I scheduled one and had to pick up my children and dash back to school to meet with her. She did not show up. My mentor said that this is his biggest problem—just getting the teachers to attend training. I had good food and drinks at my training sessions and I even bought lunch for one teacher when he came to a lunch training session--a little bribery goes a long way. I think that everyone enjoyed the training, and I am hoping word will spread and that other teachers might be more interested in coming if they can have some fun while they learn. For the teachers that could not attend training I have created the wiki at bhswriting.wikispaces.com. I added videos as some students and teachers expressed interest in seeing the directions in a video format. I also encountered one of the joys of working with cutting edge-web 2.0 technology. Google has recently changed the way that users upload documents. A teacher emailed me on Friday night because he could not understand what he was doing wrong. I had to get up Saturday morning and redo my directions—written and video—for the wiki. I got them back out to him Saturday afternoon and then helped him by rewriting the instructions for his seniors so that he could get an assignments posted Sunday night.

//Student Training// I have used Google Apps with my honors classes but I felt that I could not get a real feel for the usefulness of my directions unless I used the application with a class of regular level kids. I took a class of 30 students to our cyber café for their first login. The students vary widely in their ability to use technology. Some logged in immediately and began to type their essays. The majority took more than 20 minutes to get started and some had not logged in successfully at the end of the ninety-minute class. The problem for most of these students was the fact that the password for their accounts was "Password" with a capital "P." Then, there was the fact that they could not see the password as they typed it and the fact that they had to authenticate their accounts by typing in the computer generated codes. I ran around the Cyber Café life the proverbial headless chicken trying to help students for the entire block. Much of the problem lies in the fact that many of these kids do not own a computer and several (believe it or not) do not have email accounts. I will no longer assume that all teenagers are tech savvy. They are most certainly not. I rewrote my directions and tried again the next day and then I sent them home with directions that I rewrote a third time. I still had five of the 30 who said they could not log in. Of those five, one did have a glitch with her password but the others logged in the next day as I stood behind them and prompted them through the entire process.

I decided that rather than start the Google Apps experience with an essay that I would start with a scavenger hunt assignment. I posted the assignment and offered a reward (a brownie or candy bar) to students who could complete at least 4 of the assigned tasks. I then sent the participating students a survey. The students were very positive. Every student that participated volunteered to work as a student mentor and help teachers to use Google Apps in their classes. We are going to try to start a service hours program for student mentors. I will post a revised scavenger hunt on the Ning for other teachers to use with their students.

Looking forward, I will continue to train teachers and students over the next two weeks and I will send out surveys to see what problems they are encountering. I will continue the ADDIE process by evaluating and redesigning the wiki help pages, student documents, and videos to suit the needs of the teachers and students. Hopefully, by January we will be ready to unveil the applications for the entire student body.

Quick start page: http://bhswriting.wikispaces.com/Quick+Start Video page: http://bhswriting.wikispaces.com/Help+Videos

October 25
Planning training for the two weeks when grades are due for the end of the nine weeks was not a good idea. The tremendous response I received in the beginning of this project has waned and now teachers are trying to play catch up with grading. In addition, I have discovered that the Ning is not a good idea for a mode of training. I spent a good chunk of time researching alternatives to Ning as the Ning site itself is no longer free. I looked at http://www.buddypress.org, http://www.socialgo.com/, and http://www.amazee.com/. I finally decided to go with http://www.groupsite.com/. However, when I sent some teachers to a Ning site for a test run they were unsure of how to navigate the forums. I realized that I did not want to have to teach how to navigate a social networking site along with how to navigate Google Apps so I scrapped the Ning idea. Now I am putting things on a wiki. The wiki is straightforward and the participants can still add their ideas, resources and comments. Our first training session is scheduled for this Thursday. I know that these teachers are extremely busy so I will only have 20 minutes or so to give them a quick idea of how to get started. Over the next two days I am focusing on condensing the tutorials down to the most essential parts.

October 11
Some advice—if you ever want to learn to use Excel, find a good accountant. After spending hours struggling with Excel I called an accountant friend of mine and she helped me solve the problem within a few hours. In order to create a spreadsheet that would allow mass upload I had to have one column with the email addresses (graduation year, first initial, last name), the next column was students' first names, then a column with last names, and then a column for passwords. I began with a spreadsheet that had columns with grade level, first name, and last name so I had to find a way to change the grade level to the graduation year and to erase all but the first initial of the first names and then to combine these three columns into an email address. We played around with different formulas until we came up with =LOWER(A2&LEFT(B2,1)&C2). Of course, my mind does not work this way and it makes no sense to me, but it works. I inserted extra columns to use to work the formula and then I duplicated these columns and deleted the original. Next, I had to go through the 2000+ names and correct duplicate addresses. For instance, there were students with the same last name and first initial so I corrected those students' email addresses on the spreadsheet. After a few hours of clean up, the wonderful spreadsheet allowed me to add over 2000 student names and email addresses with one click. I saved the spreadsheet in Google Documents and then shared it with every pilot teacher so that they could access their students' addresses.

I have had a tremendous response from not only the pilot teachers but also from the other teachers who have heard about the program. I have spent a lot of time this week emailing teachers and making quick screencasts to get them started. I have been holding off on the formal tutorials because I want to include the email capabilities and the home page. We are waiting for the webhost to trouble shoot the issues we are having with the mx record. Hopefully, the webpage issues will be fixed this week so that I can use the Blythewood High Home page as a starting point for the tutorials. I also want to create a Ning site to use for sharing and training. Blackboard and shared folders are not very popular with the teachers and I am hoping that the social aspect of the Ning will be beneficial. I am also playing around with creating a group on Facebook for some of the interested teachers. Accessibility and usability seem to be the primary issues with really getting the teachers to work with Google Apps successfully.

Annotated Bibliography Rough Draft

Link to Midterm video http://www.screencast.com/t/YlniwrKcO98

September 27
Over the last two weeks I have divided my time between advertising Google Docs use at BHS, creating materials to help teachers learn Google Docs, learning to use Google Docs myself, and struggling with the CSV email uploads.

I did not anticipate needing so much time to learn to use Google Docs. I have used it in the past and felt very familiar with it, but Google Docs has changed many of its "sharing options." I am looking at ways to make the process as simple as possible so that teachers will actually buy into the application. I have used two of my classes as guinea pigs over the past few weeks. Their work has allowed me to show real student examples.

Spreading the word has been the easiest part of the internship. I have advertised through email and through word of mouth. My iPhone has been a great way to show teachers how easy it is to view a document on a Smart phone in causal conversation, but as I see only a fraction of the English teachers I used an English department meeting to present a film of Google Docs in action. I explained the plusses of Google Docs and showed examples of work from my own students. It seems that showing the applications in action is the key to showing the usefulness of the product. Teachers seem to be more willing to try Google Docs if they see it used successfully. And as English teachers are expected to do a lot of writing with their students this year (at least six essays), the tools in Google Apps for school can save a considerable amount of time and effort.

For a needs assessment, I sent a survey to 20 teachers. Eleven responded and all but three were interested in working as pilot classes. I even had a history teacher ask for help with his classes. I sent him a short Screen Jelly screen cast showing him how to group edit and he used Google Docs the next day with his freshmen.

At this point my biggest obstacle is using Excel. I am unfamiliar with the software and I have yet to come up with an easy way to upload volumes of students. I figured out how to create a spreadsheet from Power School, which incorporated the pertinent information, but when I transferred the information to Excel I ran into some snags. I had to get help from our media specialists to change formulas in the spreadsheet so that the student numbers would not lose zeros, etc. We are still trying to find a way to merge columns to make the student email addresses. The email addresses will be the year they graduate, first initial, last name@blythewoodhighschool.org. I have been doing some research on how other schools have made this process easier. I wish I knew Excel better. I may be checking out some Excel for Dummies books in the near future.

Looking toward the future, I am hoping to work a little more closely with my mentor in the coming weeks. He has been side tracked with a few teachers that are beginning to use iPads in the classroom. Much of our conversation lately has been about iPods and apps that would be good to upload. The Google school issue is not at the forefront as many important visitors are interested in seeing the iPads at work.

Link to needs assessment survey: [|**http://tinyurl.com/28hyljt**]

September 13
 Dealing with the public school system can be very frustrating. Richland Two is struggling to work out the kinks in new classroom management software that the administration just introduced in August. As usual with these new systems, training is limited. To add to those issues, a significant section of the school does not have connectivity for the laptop carts. Unless teachers have desktops with wired Internet access—only a few classrooms have these—they are met with the challenge of dropped signals and agonizingly slow loading laptops. In terms of my internship these problems have thwarted many of my well-laid plans. However, using my flexible teacher skills I have attempted to work around these issues.

 I have had a difficult time arranging planning meetings with Mr. Holland. Between the connectivity issues, the new software, and the integration of iPads into some pilot classrooms, he has been very busy. Our meetings have become shorter and shorter. The Power School classroom management software has made it difficult for us to load student numbers. Mr. Holland would like the student numbers entered in a way that we can easily see what grade each student is in. This is important for upkeep so that we can delete students as they graduate. Ease of student deletion is crucial so that we can manage the more than 2000 accounts. With the old course management this information was easy to access and download by CSV. With the new course software no one seems to know how to do it.  As we still do not have our school Gmail accounts up and running, I have spent a great deal of time "playing" with options. I have discovered a quick way to share with large numbers in such a way that they do not need a log in. I asked students to email a class Gmail account with essays attached. I then opened each essay in Google Docs and renamed them. (Next time, I'll ask students to name their essays "LastnameEssaytitle" to save time.) I created a folder and dropped each essay into the folder. I still had the problem of the best way to share the folder. I opened the share option and asked each student to type his or her email addresses in and then I set each student as an editor. Some students were still having a hard time accessing the folder. The solution was to make the folder public. As a public folder anyone has access to view and edit the essays. I posted the folder link to the public folder in our class Ning and then asked the students to follow the link and find their essays. We have worked with these essays for a few days this week. I asked the students to do a ratiocination exercise that the Writing Initiative training course suggested. Students color-coded their essays for items such as "to be" verbs, sentence length, and dead words. Next, they took their essays through another revision. It was interesting to hear their conversations about the essays. They commented to one another about paper ideas and they all seemed pleased that they do not have to hand in a printed essay. Today, I had a virtual writing workshop with a student. I added comments and she revised her essay in real time. I filmed the process using Jing. I think it will serve as evidence of just how effective a tool Google Docs can be for teacher-to-student and student-to-student collaboration.