StephanieProhaska

Internship Wiki
Annotated Bibliography Final Report Final Reflection Time Sheets [|Final Product]

**November 22, 2010**
As the semester soon comes to a close, I am well into the implementation phase of my internship. This means that I am constantly revisiting the evaluation and development phases to ensure that my website meets the needs of my client (my school). I feel that I have developed a comprehensive site to help the parents and students at my school learn about Internet Safety. After getting feedback from my principal and the surveys attached to my site, along with my colleagues, I added the safe search engines section. The safe search engines were a need found from parents who completed the survey and had ideas of what they would like to learn more about.

Dr. Smyth also had some ideas for my site, as well. He suggested that I limit the amount of links on the left to 4 sites. Then, below the different sections, have "more" that links to that specific page. This was helpful to reduce the amount of links that clutter up the left. They are still there for quick access, but also are not too long. This also enabled me to turn the safe search engines into the whole page. The nice thing about having the individual pages with information, is that if new sites arise, especially with the search engines, I can add them to one page instead of to all four pages (on the left side).

I also created a few Flash titles for the sites for students, sites for parents, and safe search engines pages. They are very simple, classic tweens where the red words slowly fade in, but it adds a nice different flare to each page. The best thing about creating and adding the Flash items was easy it was to insert it into my webpage. iPage is very user friendly and it was very easy to upload the swf files right into the exact spot on my page that I wanted.

I've gotten the approval of my principal to add the link to the website so that any parent or student can visit the site. I have gotten a lot of positive feedback so far from the surveys. I have also been doing a lot of research for my annotated bibliography and therefore reading a lot about Internet safety and cyberbullying. I would like to possibly add a page specifically about cyberbullying in the future. In the fourth grade that I am the learning support teacher for, it seems like the students are just starting to really get to the phase where they bully each other in the classroom. I can see this coming into play in the online environment as well, since most family members have facebook, etc.

I'm going to continue to use the feedback from the survey over the last two weeks of the semester. As I compile my final reflection and report, I feel accomplished that I have created a successful website. Here is a screen shot of my final site! ([|stephaniecraig.org])



**November 8, 2010**
I have accomplished quite a lot since my last reflection! I decided to upload my website on my own domain name, since I knew I would need domain for next semester anyway. I found a site called [|ipage.com] that had affordable web hosting and domains. It was 3.50 a month and 8.99 for domain privacy. You also pay for the whole year upfront, so you don't have to worry about being billed monthly. There is many different ways you can upload pages, either FTP, the file manager, or it actually includes a site maker where you can create six pages. My site can now be seen at []. I'm really excited about being able to host my own site! This will also make my site more accessible for those outside of my school, such as friends and colleagues who have children as well and need to teach Internet Safety.

These past two weeks, along with working more on the development of my site and hosting it on ipage, I have also gotten a lot of feedback from my colleagues on the layout and content of my site. I found this great picture for the top of the site and decided to change it from the orange template to this template. It is still a css, but it is a little more user friendly format. They also really liked that I added the four rules for Internet Safety because some students may not know those specific four rules and can always use a reminder.

My colleagues also suggested adding student friendly search engines on the web site. I thought this was a good idea and added them to the side bar of quick access links. I also created a survey so I can get some evaluation feedback from parents and students who visit the site. I added a question to rate the three different pages, an open comment box for what they would like to see added, and a third question about what they fear most from being a parent of a student online. I thought that the third question could be used to gear future information to add to the pages.

I am meeting with my principal tomorrow to go over what else he would like to see on the website, and how the development and evaluation is going. Since he has a lot of contact with the parents in the PTO, and just from parents who give suggestions and complaints, I am interested to get feedback and evaluation from his perspective to make sure we are on the right track. Once he reviews the site and makes sure it is exactly what we want it to be, then we will post the link to the Nolensville Elementary website so that parents and students can start to take advantage of the information! I'm really glad that I decided to do this project because as we take the students into the computer lab more and more, I am seeing first hand that the students do not have a good sense of Internet Safety. I think by having these links and information handy will really help them to become better with their Internet knowledge and help their parents become more aware of what their students are doing online.

My goal for the next few weeks is to continue with the evaluation process, see if there is anything additional I need to add such as a tutorial on something, or possibly a flash object. It would be interesting to add some flash to my website to make it fun to visit. Once the final version of the website is ready, I will add the link to the website and be finished for now! I am going to continue to use the feedback from the survey to tweak and improve the website along the way. I can't believe this semester is almost over! It has flown by!

**October 25, 2010**
As we close in the end of the eighth week of the internship, I am very happy with the progress of my website. I have almost completed the first example of the site and am in the process of turning it into my principal so that he can approve it and we can put it on the website to start getting evaluation and feedback from parents, students and teachers. As soon as it gets posted on the school's website, I will be able to post a link on this reflection page so that everyone can see the site I have created. I found that the actual creation of the website was very fun and also very smooth because of the amount of time I spent on my analysis of the information.

Throughout the development and implementation phase, I have been most proud of the comprehensive site I have created. I believe it is a very informational site about internet safety, and I am excited to get feedback from my principal and colleagues. When I was thinking about the layout of my site, I focused on trying to make the site easy to navigate and understand. As a busy teacher, I know that working parents do not want to spend a lot of time navigating through a complicated site. I took advantage of a CSS template and used one with a four tab navigation tool bar at the top of the page.

As soon as my site gets approved, the task will then be to upload it to our school's server. My fear is that because I used the CSS template, it will be a tough task. Unfortunately, I am not the one who will be uploading it, it will be my school's technology coach, who is another teacher. I'm sure that we will be able to figure out how to get all four pages, along with the template and images on the server. I also talked with my principal that if it would possibly not upload, I could place it on a personal hosting site and link it to the school site.

I'm excited to get my site uploaded and start the evaluation of the site. I know that there are so many things that you don't think about until another eye looks at it. I created a new lesson plan template for our school and my principal and I thought the first version was a great, comprehensive version. When we sent it out to the teachers to start working, there were so many ideas they had that we just overlooked. Even something as small as I added different colors to the sections to help your eyes break up the different sections. The teachers loved the different colors because of the readability, but hated printing them and wasting their ink, something I totally did not think about! So I'm going to be interested to hear the feedback that I get from colleagues, parents, and students.

While I am working on this site for my school, our district was recognized for their use of Internet Safety in the classroom. This makes my site even more useful because parents are now wanting even more information about Internet Safety and what they can do at home. It is also very important that my site will be linked from our schools site because currently, the only information is a small amount linked from the district's site.

Midterm Report
These past two weeks have gone very fast. I have not made as much progress as I had hoped to in the development phase, so I am going to have to try to make more significant progress over the next two weeks. I began developing my website, and have the four basic pages outlined. Using my storyboard does make it very easy to organize the content. Here is a screen shot of the format of all four pages, which will be the homepage, parents, students, and more info.



I am also planning on putting all of the quick links to the resources for the specific individual (parent or student) on the left tool bar, along with links to more resources. This will be the "quick stop shop" Internet Safety links. I wanted to make the website simple, since parents and students will be using the website. I also wanted to keep the format the same throughout each of the pages, so the entire orange section will stay the same. Each time a section is clicked on from one of the tabs, the tab they are currently on will turn white, and everything else stays light orange. I am also planning on adding more graphics throughout the website, these ones I found from [|www.freedigitalphotos.net]. My hope is to have a full prototype for my principal to view by Tuesday, October 19th. This gives me time to get through grades and progress reports this week, two IEP meetings, and fall break this upcoming weekend.

After I finish the prototype of the website, I plan on creating a survey to receive feedback about the content of the site. I am going to implement it with a subgroup of my target audience, my assistants. They are parents who can evaluate the site and can have their children give feedback as well, who are in the target audience of students. I will also have my principal review the site's content, so that we can test the html files on the server. I am not able to upload anything onto our school's server until the content is approved by my principal and the instructional technology person for the school. Once the site goes "live," I will be able to get feedback from a broader subset of my target audience. I currently have nine students on my caseload, and plan on emailing their parents the link and a link to an online survey to fill out for feedback as well.

My research for the annotated bibliography has sent me in some interesting directions that I would not have thought about otherwise. For instance, one research study was a project on the effects of the government mandated filtering that came about in 2000. The researcher surveyed students on their knowledge of self-protected Internet safety from two groups: one group that had gone through high school with the filters on the Internet, and the other group that had gone through high school without the filtering. Interestingly, the researcher found that there was not a significant difference in the knowledge of students about Internet safety. I thought that this was important for my project to show parents that filters are not enough; students have to be taught how to keep themselves safe in order to protect them online.

I am really excited to finish the development phase and move onto evaluation and implementation. I think that the site will be a big benefit for parents who are looking for more education on the topic of Internet safety. I also think that it will help students to be more exposed to staying safe online since we do not get to teach it in the classroom as often as we would like too. It is being taught, but possibly not at the depth that it needs to be. There are so many free tools for parents and students online, someone just needs to filter the best content and compile it all into an easily accessible site. That is the goal of my whole internship project.

September 27, 2010
For the past two weeks, I have been finishing my analysis phase, and moving to the design phase of my Internship. To continue with my analysis, it was necessary to complete my own needs assessment of things I would need to do to begin this project. I investigated the medium and type of website that our school uses, by talking with the technology coach at our school. We do not have a full time technology coach, but one of the Kindergarten teachers, Melissa Miller, acts as the technology coach by being the webmaster and taking care of toner and small computer issues. We also have an IT contact for the district that is based at five schools, including ours, who installs software and fixes major computer issues. I found out that I will be able to create html files and Melissa will upload them to our server once they are approved. Ryan, our IT contact, installed Microsoft Web Expressions on my PC work computer, because that is the software the district uses. However, I think that I am going to use my personal Mac computer to create the files and use Dreamweaver. I am more familiar with Dreamweaver and believe that I will be creating most of the pages at home, versus at school.

As I continued my content analysis of information I would need for the project, I focused largely on the iSafe curriculum that the district uses in the classroom and recommends to parents. I found that the iSafe website is actually not very user friendly, and the information would be hard to find for parents. Therefore I made one of the goals for this project to be a tutorial of the iSafe website and how parents can use the site to find information for themselves and for their children. I also found student friendly Internet Safety information in NetSmartz and xblock of the iSafe site. Since I do not want to this site to be an overload of information for parents, I am going to focus on NetSmartz, iSafe, and iKeepSafe. All three of these sites have sections for parents and students, along with valuable tutorials.

After having my needs analysis and content analysis completed, I moved onto the design phase. I developed goals and objectives for my project.
 * 1) The learner will read information about the importance of Internet Safety.
 * 2) The learner will find resources about Internet Safety through NetSmartz, iSafe, and iKeepSafe.
 * 3) The learner will learn how to navigate and use the information on the the iSafe curriculum website by watching a tutorial on the features and included resources.
 * 4) The learner will learn how to set content filters on their browsers by watching a powerpoint tutorial.
 * 5) The learner will learn how to set filters on facebook, myspace, and webkins by watching a tutorial.
 * 6) The learner will discover fun and interactive websites that teach students Internet Safety.
 * 7) The learner will find where additional tutorials can be found for parents and students.
 * 8) The learner will discover safe searching websites.
 * 9) The learner will discover Internet Safety extends to other aspects of technology safety (iPods, cell phones/text messages, iPads, etc.).

I then moved on to begin to outline my website by creating a written storyboard. This helped me to outline exactly what I want to include on my website. The design of my site will be: a front page with a short intro about Internet Safety and two links, one for parents and one for students. On the parent's page, I will include additional pages on the iSafe tutorial, the browser filters, the NetSmartz info, iKeepSafe info, social networking info, along with additional resources and research. On the students page, I will include a page on each of the following: NSteens, NetSmartzKidz, iSafe X-Block, iKeepSafe, and safe search engines. Each page will include screen shots and short, student friendly information, along with a link to the webpage. My draft of my storyboard is attached:



I am excited to move to the develop phase. I feel like I have a great foundation of information to turn into a great website. The storyboarding and organization I have done throughout these past two weeks is going to make the development phase much easier. I also am starting to think about the type of assessment I can use to assess the usefulness of my website and to see if it meets the needs of the population. After I have an initial website up and running, I plan to test it on my assistants, who are all parents as well, and have them complete a survey. Because they are a sub-set of my population, this will give me an evaluation aspect of whether I need to change or update any information/layout. These first four weeks have already gone very fast, and I'm assuming the rest of the internship will go fast as well!

**September 13, 2010**
For my internship, I wanted to create a useful and needed artifact of educational technology for my current school, Nolensville Elementary. Nolensville is a wonderful elementary school that is a part of Williamson County School District. Being in an area of Nashville that has trends towards higher socio-economic class, our school and district is rich with technology. I first spoke with my principal, Mr. Ryan Harris, with some ideas I had for internship project. These included creating blogs for each of the teachers to help parents become aware of the activities going on in the classroom, a professional development Moodle site on the use of Web 2.0 tools in the classroom, a professional development Moodle site on universal design for learning, and an Internet Safety website to help parents learn how to keep their children safe online. I also asked him if there were any immediate needs for the school based on feedback from teachers, parents, and students. Mr. Harris explained that at the last PTO meeting, a concern of parents was that they did not know how to keep their children safe online. At least 90% of the school has Internet access at home, and the majority allows their children to use the Internet. Therefore the need for a website for parents about keeping students safe online was a needed an important internship project for me to pursue.

When Mr. Harris talked to the superintendent to get my project approved, he gave me some guidelines and rules to follow. First, the website needed to follow the iSafe curriculum, which is what is taught in the classroom. However, since our district is adopting a new 90-minute reading program, many other subjects need to be taught in a shorter amount of time, leaving less important topics, such as Internet Safety, to possibly not be taught at all. Therefore we expanded my project to include information for parents and students to ensure that students will be exposed to Internet Safety in some form or another. Also, since my website will be linked to our Nolensville Elementary School site, I cannot create or advertise for any site or product that will cost the parents money to purchase.

After finally getting the project in order and approved, I decided to outline what my and Mr. Harris’ vision of the Internet Safety site would look like. The Internet Safety site will include the following: > I began to research the iSafe curriculum, along with student friendly search engines and parent resources/tools. I am starting to find that there is an abundance of information on the web about Internet Safety already, the important aspect for me is going to be to sift through the content and only provide parents with the best information possible. I am also finding that there are a lot of search engines that claim to be content filtering. However when searching simple terms, inappropriate content still appears. It is going to be a challenge to ensure that the information I am giving to students is appropriate and meets the goals of the project.
 * Student friendly websites and search engines
 * Student resources to learn how to keep themselves safe online
 * Parent resources to learn how to keep their students safe online
 * Tutorials on how to set the browser content filters
 * Safe and unsafe choices online
 * Overview of the iSafe curriculum

My next step is to meet with the technology specialist for the district to determine the medium I will need to create the site on and how to link it to the existing site. My principal will need to review the site before it goes live, so I will need to find out how to create a preview site for him. I will then move on to continue my research for the project and to begin to draft and storyboard my website and tutorials.