We had a good summer and smooth start to the year in the tech department! As has been the practice recently we got in some extra part time help for the couple of summer months, which I’m so grateful for. It enables us to all take some time off over that period and still manage to get a lot of things done, without it all getting overwhelmingly stressful! Over those two months it was our usual tasks of upgrading existing staff and student computers, various classroom moves, adding more Chromecarts, more wireless upgrades in certain buildings, getting tech into the new portables at WIS, some more wall mounted interactive projectors at the middle school, server hardware and software upgrades, and even finally getting round to taking parts of our old phone system off the wall (still lots of old cabling to tidy up there)!
Things got busy in late August as staff were returning and new staff coming onboard, the guys were hustling to get everyone what they needed as quickly as possible, but it was all pretty minor things and so teachers were up and running right on target for the start of school.
I’m excited by the high school’s initiative to have all teachers using Google Classroom this year. John had me come in for a couple of days of training just before school started and I think his staff really saw the power of coordinating where the students look for their work and resources in one place, along with all the added communication pieces that go along with it. Of course, many of his staff were already using it, but we helped the rest get up to speed with it as well. I hope we can gradually move this down to the middle school where again many teachers are already making use of it.
Last year our department was involved in actually teaching students about technology in a couple of small ways, and that’s continuing into this year. I spent a semester in the high school getting an ‘Intro to CS’ class going, with another volunteer from the community (Jim Darden) and Mike Lindsay. Now Mike is teaching that himself, and Jim and I (along with a new volunteer, Sarah Gilliam) are teaching an AP Comp Sci class with Paul Huddleston. And Travis and Will from our department spent a couple of hours a week (in turn) for half of last year working with a young man from our Partners In Transition program, helping him get his CompTIA Fundamentals certification at the end of last year. He’ll be back to work with those two again as he goes for the next credential, the A+ exam on computer hardware.