Final+Project-+Martha

**Working Together Blog: My Final Project**
My leadership goal for the final project is to become an Educational Technology leader at my schools. I have taken three technology courses and I am both interested in and comfortable with Web 2.0 technology tools for education. My schools do not have an educational technologist and, quite honestly, there are a number of teachers who are not comfortable with tools that are available. (Wikis scare them!) I see taking a role in this field as having a number of benefits: a. I have asked to be a part of the Curriculum and Leadership Committees but was told that the committees are already set. There is a technology leadership void so I can step into this role and start to grow as a leader. b. There is a gee-whiz fun factor that will allow me to get into classroom and working with teachers and students in a positive way. c. Once I am established as a “leader” and have a closer relationship with teachers, I will be able to expand my leadership role into the areas of the NETS Technology Standards and the AASL’s Standards for the 21st Century Learner and incorporate research and information skills into our curriculum in a more complete way. In some ways, I see this as a more pressing goal but sometimes, an end run to the goal is more successful that the direct route.

My short term goals are to writes two posts a week about a specific technology tools. For example, I posted today on the use of Voki and Xtranormal by Foreign Language teachers to engage their students in another way to make conversation. In addition to the postings, I will email the teachers who would be most apt to use the technology. After a week, I will follow up with an informal chat to these teachers and offer to help them set up the technology and present it to their students with them. Some ideas will “sprout” and others won’t but it is my goal to get into two classrooms a month this year to present a new technology tool or use.

As I said, I have taken three different technology courses (I am counting Vermont’s 23 Things as one of them!) I probably have 20 or so posts that I could already write but I do not want to overwhelm teachers. (I am a little concerned that two posts a week will be more than they can take in.) But those 20 post will be quickly used and I need to do background research to keep getting new ideas for myself and to make sure that I present the ideas using terminology from the NETS standard and the Vermont Technology Grade Expectations, both to support the use of the technology and to solidify my role as an educational leader. The research I will do means studying the standards and the literature supporting using technology tools in education. It also means following the educational technology blogs on my Google Reader.

Monitoring my progress will be achieved rather simply. I will maintain an Excel Chart (or Google Docs) in which I keep track of the posts I send, the email follow up, the conversation follow up and whether or not the post became a classroom exercise.

Each staff member in the high school belongs to two action committees, a culture team and a curriculum team. We meet with each of our teams one Monday a month instead of going to a faculty meeting. One of my teams is the technology team. I have presented this idea to my team and will present my progress to them regularly. They will give me feedback and suggestions that may help me fine tune as the year progresses. They will also let me know of specific technological needs that they see in the hopes that I can help address it. (One teacher has already asked that I look at online note-taking tools as it seems ridiculous to him that students are doing most of their research online but that teachers are still asking for notes on 3-5 note cards.)

Because so much of our staff time is taken up with the team meetings, time to present at staff meetings is not available. If I do not get the involvement that I hope for, I will speak up at faculty meeting enough to give a short, enthusiastic promotional blurb for my posts. I will also offer tutorials as needed during teacher’s prep times. It is also my hope that Jennifer Faith and Liv Perry, two other librarians in my district, will acts as mentors and support for me in this project as I will be for them. It is important that we have chances to talk with each other as we do not have other librarians in our buildings. I found it one of the nicer things about this course that we have begun to email each other for advice, support, or even to offer a cool handout this fall and I hope that we continue.

My plan will involve using a blog because I think that is the best way to write intermittent messages online. It is easy to set up, it is searchable, can hold a variety of information "types", and my teachers will soon, I hope, set up the RSS feeds so that the individual emails will not be needed. (I won’t count on that though!) My blog will act as my homepage so I will list my frequently visited sites. I will have links to my other websites and tools. In addition, I will have links to sites that both I and my teachers and students can use to learn more about technology in education. As time goes on, I will add other valuable sites for learning about education and libraries.

My blog is Working Together, located at [|http://palibrarynotes.wordpress.com/]