Late May, Early June 2006
In the spring of 2006, I was accepted in the Local School Technology Coordinator (LSTC) academy for Gwinnett County. This academy was put into place to prepare students for a position as an LSTC at a Gwinnett County School.
Since I was accepted into the LSTC academy, I had to start attending the academy meetings right away. We were only out of school for a weekend or so when we started the academy. We met at the ISC building in Gwinnett County. When we arrived the first day, we did what most people do on the first day, introduce ourselves. We spoke about where we were currently employed and spoke a little bit about our personal lives. After introductions, Joni Jones started explaining what we would be learning in the LSTC academy. Afterwards, we jumped right into the curriculum. We spoke about what we thought the duties of an LSTC are, and why those duties are important. We did a number of other activities before moving to a computer lab for the rest of the day.
In the computer lab, Joni had us login to Gwinnett University online. This webpage allowed us to submit documents a lot like webct does for UGA. We had a couple of assignments that required us to do research online and submit our work to the online campus.
One day was committed to learning Lotus notes, our email program in Gwinnett County. We learned Lotus notes inside and out. This was very useful and I’ve used a lot of the techniques I learned that day.
Along with Lotus notes, we had some training using IGPro which is the grade book program that we use in Gwinnett. Again, there were many things that the program could do that we were unaware of. It was very helpful to me as well.
The three days during the summer accounted for about 21 hours of my internship. When school started back, we met once a month for each month, for 3 hours/session. Each of these sessions had different topics. We learned about excel, access, classxp (our attendance program), hyper snap, and a few other programs that were introduced by students in the academy. The lessons that I learned the most in was classxp and hyper snap. I hadn’t had much experience with these before these class sessions. Hyper snap was very easy, but very beneficial for making tutorials and handouts for teachers and students. Classxp is our attendance program which I mentioned earlier, but it is also used to do advanced query searches. We also use it to export our grades as teachers. Getting a better understand of the program was very helpful for us in the academy.
15 hours total
March 6th 2007
I had the opportunity to travel to the ISC building in Gwinnett county and shadow my LSTC. We arrived at the ISC and began with an introduction from Sandy Ewanowski and Faye Curlee. They announced the LSTC's that would be leaving the county for other opportunities, and then announced that the county has revised the job description for the LSTC position. This was interesting to me, because I have heard a lot of LSTC's are unhappy with some of the duties that are assigned to them. After breaking out into different groups, we attended a class on Photoshop. The teacher of the class was from outside of the county, but she was very knowledgeable of the program and did a good job showing us how to use the different tools in the program. John and I both learned a lot in this class. The tools that we used the most were the Healing tool, Stamp tool, Lasso tool, Magic Wand, Selection Tool, Crop Tool. These were very valuable as we were trying to restore old photos, take out blemishes, etc. After lunch, we attended a second clinic on Digicasting. We learned a lot about a program called Audacity. This program allowed us to edit sound in a variety of different ways. I’ve used windows moviemaker for video editing, but I've been looking for one that will edit sound. Audacity is a great (free) program that I'm excited about getting to use. I think this was a very helpful class session. I showed up to the ISC building at 8:00 a.m. and left the building at 4:00 pm, so this was an 8 hour day.
Agenda Book Committee
My department head sent out an email requesting that someone in the business ed. Department serve on the agenda book committee, I volunteered for the position because I knew that I would be helping with the project anyway! John had spoken to me about helping with this process because it takes a while to gather all the information for the student agenda book and to format it correctly. So far, we’ve had two official meetings. Each meeting was one hour long. During the first meeting, we discussed what we liked and disliked about our current agenda book. We decided that each committee member representing their department would ask the faculty and staff they represent if any changes are needed. At the next meeting, we discussed these changes and decided which ones we would address. We agreed the style and layout, and even have an art teacher who is willing to do the cover art.
John wasn’t happy about being responsible for the agenda book. There are actually a few duties that he has and doesn’t like. For instance, he doesn’t enjoy bus duty or the calling post job. The calling post job is when a message needs to be given to every parent of every student at school. John has to record a verbal message, put the sound file on this machine, and have it call every parent of every child and leave the message. I haven’t learned how to use this but I have seen John do it. It’s another administrative duty that he feels like the LSTC shouldn’t be responsible for.
Agenda book hours – 5 so far
Track Webpage
Since I’m working as an assistant track coach, John ask me to create a webpage for the track team, here is the URL, http://www.shiloh.high.gwinnett.k12.ga.us/athlet/track/index.htm
This website took me around 10 hours total to create. I knew that it would be stored on the school server so I tried to keep the file size low. I also am in charge of maintaining the site. I have it setup so that when the head track coach needs updates, he sends me what he wants updated and I can make the changes to the HTML files and re upload the webpage to the school site. Most of the updating that I’ve done so far has been to schedule and the news page. These generally don’t take too long to do.
I told the coaches that I wanted to stay away from uploading graphics, because we would have to get parent signatures if we had individual photos of students on the website.
Track Webpage hours thus far – 12 hours
Lab Cleaning
Part of the job of an LSTC at Shiloh is making sure the labs stay clean. I helped clean the B-1 computer lab by dusting off the tops of the computers and underneath the monitors. I also picked up trash on the floor and around the desks. This lab is being used to register students for next years’ classes so it had to be cleaned.
2 hours
