Embedded+Course+Reflections

This was a very interesting class that helped me understand the purpose of the Star Chart and Texas Long Range Plan. I really never heard of the Texas Long Range Plan till this course which is shocking that to me that school districts don’t inform their faculty about things like this. I have always received the email from our campus technologist to go to the website and fill out the star chart, but I have never heard results from it or heard how it was used for anyone on campus. In this course I found out that there are many standards that schools have to follow for technology. Along with the Texas long Range Plan and Star Chart there is also the National Educational Technology Applications Standards, No Child Left Behind and there is also Texas Technology Standards - which is a test for technology knowledge by the eighth grade. After researching the Star Chart I realized that my schools weakness is professional development towards technology. Being a computer teacher I do have the student to computer ration so I sometimes don’t realize that our students are suffering not having that computer ratio. Just like me my colleagues fill out the star chart because we have to and we never hear anything about it. I wonder if our campus technologists do anything with that data when it comes back. I really liked this class and had a big realization about technology not being that important in our schools. TAKS scores are what takes up most of our concerns.
 * 5306 Concepts of Educational Technology: **

** 5333Leadership Accountability: ** In this course we had to use campus reports to interpret the data to see what our weakness is. Then we had to prepare a staff development that would fix this weakness. The area I chose to create a staff development for was improving standardized test scores of African Americans in science as the major area of weakness for Midway High School. While eighty-seven percent of all science-test takers met the standards set by the State of Texas, which clearly exceeds the seventy-five percent needed to achieve a Recognized Rating, only seventy-two percent of African Americans met the standard. According to the data, the results of this sub-group were an enormous road block to MHS achieving a Recognized Rating. My plan was to implement a tutorial program requiring all science teachers to provide tutorials either pre or post normal school hours for all at-risk students. Secondly, we will schedule science teachers to help in SPED room during their planning period once a week. This will result in a science teacher being in the SPED classroom every day to help at-risk students in science mastery. Lastly, MHS will introduce interim assessments to gauge science students’ progress in mastery of Science TEKs. Once all measures have been implemented, TAKs scores will be used to gauge effectiveness of this action plan. This was a hard assignment for me since I tech technology and don’t really look at the effects of TAKS on our school or our students.

 **5362 Information Systems Management:** This class was very beneficial to me for the future of my career. I gained a lot of valuable information through this particular assignment about my district's student information system. We use a system called e-school plus, and I am so amazed at how much information this system holds. I wouldn't really say that I had a lot of previous knowledge, just that I knew our information was stored somehow. Being in the career and technical education department of my school has helped me to have some knowledge of things like PIEMS. Every year CTE has to do PIEMS coding on all of our students. What I didn't know is that e-school plus hosts all this information about our students. As a teacher I was familiar with the gradebook and attendance portion of it but now realize that there is so much more. Everyone that I talked to about the system seems to have the same opinion about it. They all love it and when information is put into the system nothing ever has to be duplicated. It can be used multiple times for different things. Adminstration can run reports from all the data in the system with ease. Since I want to be involved with PIEMS and work with a student information system in a school district then I should probably better myself and research several different ones to have a knowledgable background.

**5364 Teaching with Technology:** This was a class that had so many different things to learn from. Collaboration through google docs was a new experience for me. I was so nervous about it being difficult to collaborate with others that don't live in the same place as me. It worked out nicely to have like a live chat through google docs and everyone used a different color to keep it organized. Through this class I also learned about CAST's UDL lesson builder and the how to build a book through the book builder site. This particular lesson builder template focused on students needs and different learning styles, which is always something teachers are focused on. Working with a group was such a different experience for me but it turned out great. We worked well together and came up with a great final project. Google docs was really useful throughout the group work because everyone could give their input and make sure that tasks were being completed. The book builder site was kind of fun and interesting. I ended up making a book for my two year old daughter. I would like to know more of how high school teachers would use this site for their classes. It was very easy to use and to share with others. I didn't leave this class with any questions really at all.

I gained quite a bit of knowledge through creating this online course. I have created online course through moodle, so I enjoyed learning to create an online course through a different program, Schoology. It was not a new experience being the creator of a course. Schoology was a challenge, but I enjoyed it. It didn’t seem to work with ease like I thought that it would. Using the backward design was a new experience for me. I have always used the 5E lesson format, but the backward design gave me a new perspective on lesson building I have a hard time believing that my colleagues will be on board with online courses. I work at a high school where the teachers were my teachers and are set in their ways. I had a difficult time putting this lesson into schoology so I fear that the initial process would scare them away from creating or learning. I know that online course would benefit the high school greatly but I don’t know how to prove that to the teachers I work with. I know at my high school our instructional technologists have used moodle to teach us new things like animoto or Microsoft office, but I would like to see how other high schools are using online courses. I am not puzzled about anything at this point.
 * 5368 Instructional Design **

I worked alone on the creation of this course. The performance indicators I experienced during this assignment were: I.B, II.A, II.B, III.A, III.C, III.D, AND III.E.

This assignment was more up my alley of what I do. I was really excited about doing the newsletter because I was having to make one for our education foundation anyway. Learning about the design rules were interesting, contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity. I never knew that there was so much that went into creating page layouts. I have always just sat down and made things to the way I like it and never put all rules into effect. I find myself critiquing everything using the design principles now. I knew the basics of font color needed to contrast the background color, but did not know about repeating elements and the importance of proximity. I worked alone on this assignment, but did have the education foundation looking over constantly to make sure the design was good. I do not have any questions to ask about this assignment. I think that it would have been cool to see others newsletters that were in my class. My newsletter went out to the community so it was really neat to see that show up in my mailbox and to know that everyone else was looking at my newsletter.
 * 5366 Digital Graphics, Animation and Desktop Publishing **

During this assignment I gain experience in the following performance indicators: II.D, II.E, II.F, III.A, III.C, III.D, V.C, and V.D.

** 5363 Video Technology and Multimedia ** This class was my favorite probably because it was the most familiar for me. I teach graphic design and video editing. Working with a group was the challenging part but beneficial. I did learn about different editing software which was helpful for the class that I teach. I am a little more experienced in video editing so I thought that Movie Maker was to simple. For a beginner though it is the perfect software because it is so user friendly. There were others I looked at were not as easy for me to use. Our PSA was edited by a by me since I had the editing experience and I used more sophisticated software. As for most teachers, I feel Movie Maker would be a great program to use with students to create and edit videos. To complete the PSA assignment, we needed to work well as a group. There was lots of planning and dividing up tasks complete our final project. I really wasn’t sure how this was going to work to begin with because sometimes files can be so large and trying to pass those along can be a challenge. We ended up using a google website to store everything. Everyone contributed in different ways and I was impressed how five people across the state could collaborate so well. One of the most valuable things I learned during this project was different ways to use the web to communicate.

There is nothing that puzzles me with this assignment. During this assignment I gained experience in the following performance indicators: I.A, I.B, II.C, II.F, V.B, V.D

**5365 Web Design ** Before this assignment I did not know what my district web policy was and what it was used for. Once I found the policy I realized that it is used to layout the guidelines for the district website. The funny thing is that my district just came out with the web policy last year because we switched over to a new web design and they finally wanted some consistency in the site. I did have a hard time creating this document just because there is so much information that goes into it. The web policy that my district already had was not what it should be at all. There really was not much help out there in my district or other surrounding districts. Our readings for the course also did not address all of the components required in the document. This really confused me or puzzled me. I am still not sure what the actual components are for a web policy so I am not sure that mine is adequate enough to use for the district. I would like to know why a lot of districts don’t post their web policy on their website. I know my district does not put it out there but I could not get an answer from anyone in my district as to why not either. I worked alone on this assignment, there were no group processes. During this assignment I gained experience in the following performance indicators: I.A, I.B, VI.A, VI.C, VIII.A.