Blog Post #4

May 3, 2015- Wow!  Flexibility is vital in the Education World.  I started out my practicum with the goal of teaching teachers about Google and Learning Earnings.  During my first presentation to the staff, I taught about Google Search, Google Drive, and Google Forms while touching on Learning Earnings.  Many of the staff had follow up questions about Google and I have helped them individually with those questions.  Learning Earnings is a reward software that had many problems to be handled by the company.  Our school is piloting this new software and the teachers that were using it at the beginning of the year already had a routine for awarding points to students, other teachers were not ready to utilize the program.   At times I think teachers exclude new software until they know it is going to stay as part of the school program.  Some new software that is introduced with excitement seems to fade away the next school year or with the next supervisor.  

The flexibility part comes with the new endeavor that the school is utilizing.  The house system has been introduced to the rest of our staff and they were all “sorted” into their houses.  As with all new ideas, there were some that were excited and some that were not excited.  As the group continues to work on the implementation of the new system, I have been helping with Google and MovieMaker, as well as other technical questions.  I am looking forward to finding a software program that will help keep up with our house points and then introducing it to our staff. 

This school year is closing but I have enjoyed the last few weeks utilizing some of the concepts I brought back from Atlanta.  I have noticed a huge difference in my students with the changes that I have implemented into my own classroom.  Teaching the students about Google Search was a great lesson especially before they completed research on a Historical Figure in Alabama for our wax museum exhibit.