The Second Round of Initial Interviews

On Monday I met with four more teachers to complete my initial interviews at GNETS. First I went to meet with Mrs. Wolf to make sure that this time was going to be alright for everyone for the rest of the semester and to make sure that she was fine with me interrupting the teachers for thirty minutes every other week. She agreed to everything and all is right on track. I will in the future need to let her know the information that a lot of her staff has given me about how they would like to see technology run in the school.

First I met with Ms. O. She had a lot of ideas about how the technology should be handled in the school. She wants the Smartboard to be stationary in one technology room where everyone could come to and was already set up for group work with the board. This is a possibility for the future because Gnets is actually moving to a new location next year. In the past, the Smartboard was in the pace lab with the idea for all of the teachers to have equal access. Unfortunately, the room was never set up with the equipment ready, and there were never chairs set up when a class went in to use the technology. The expectations of the room were not met and so the Smartboard in the room failed as a whole.

She said that if the technology was readily available to her, she would have her students using the board at the very least three times a week. She knows that her students would get a lot of experience, fun, and learning out of using the technology. As the teacher is such a setting, he or she needs to know the technology inside and out in order to maintain order in the classroom and keep the emotional outbursts to a minimal at a psychological education center. She would also love to have a setting where the teacher could sign in under her own name and all of her personal content and lesson plans would be right there. For her lesson, she had many ideas. She wants to be able to share current events with her students like the earthquake in Haiti. She also mentioned doing a unit on weather in science class. Because she needs to work the breakfast where the event will be taking place, we will put her class presentation later in the morning so that clean up will not be an issue for her and her class. I will research all three of her topics to see which has the greatest possibility for a lesson. The main example that she seemed the most excited about was studying the regions of GA.

On the scale, I would put Ms. O below a level one. She is very willing to learn the technology though and excited.