The journey of an ICT coordinator

Today was a major event. The old computers were disconnected and stored while the new computers were unboxed and set up. What a mammoth task it was. My extension group successfully achieved this task and all within the allocated time of 1 hour. Unfortunately my computer lab is piled high with rubbish and now I wait to see when i can go back to teaching in the lab again. Just a note, when there are over 100 computers to be deployed and only one dumpster, somehow we should have organised the emptying of the dumpster early to ensure that it didn’t over flow!!! I must remember that next time……..Very happy with the new ICT roll out!!!!

Last Thursday our staff participated in training led by Dr John Ingram and Kay Hanson. It was a fantastic day and the staff embraced their training and throughly enjoyed the day. As part of our ICT roll out as a school community we have decided to embed the program created by Dr John and Kay called Digital Excellence. I first came across the program at the Lynbrook Conference earlier this year and saw it as an answer to a lot of the issues raised in our eLearning plan. I spent some time with Nick the ICT coordinator at Lynbrook discussing and looking through the program and seeing how their results in ICT have improved and how teachers use the program. I then arranged for John and Kay to meet the Principal of my school, he was very enthused by the program and gave me the go ahead to start this year with a plan to fully embrace the program next year. The teachers and students (our digital experts) were trained on Thursday and already students are asking about the program and when they can do complete their badges and go online to do projects. If you haven’t heard of this program I do truly believe it is worth investigating. The program gives direction and enables teachers to take on ICT within their room and take ownership and to teach the skill that goes with ICT making sure that all you as the coordinator are teaching is consolidated within the classroom. Digital Excellence has arrived and we are so excited!!!!

The ICT roll out is upon us at school and there is a flurry of activity. I will no longer be in the computer lab for at least the rest of this week and how I am in mourning already and to make matters worse, we won’t have any network either!!! Looking to the future…….at least our whole school will finally be up to date with technology and things will run a lot smoother….well that is the plan, but this is technology!!! I am looking forward to running with the new technology and am looking forward as well to all the things I will be able to do, and its not just me it will also be the teachers who have been left with old dilapidated computers for too long. Teachers will now be free to run with technology and embrace it within the school, there isn’t any excuse now! Bring it on……

Well it’s all go at our school. We are working on the ICT roll out of all the new computers and software, its a huge job.  The roll out will start within the next two weeks. Next week will be another major week as we will start the training of staff in the Digital Excellence program, one i am really looking forward to seeing up and running and excited about. I know it will give our school direction and assist the teachers to know what it is they should be teaching and how they will teach it. The kids as well will be wrapped with this program and will enjoy the rewards of achieving success in being digital citizens.

Been very quiet for a while, lots has happend with writing reports and child care for my daughter so have been a little preoccupied. Well today was a productive day. Myself and my co worker organised our TPL paper work and started our powerpoint for the Department’s Knowledge Bank, we registered for the IWB conference to be held in Sydeny and we wrote up a timetable of the Professional Learning to be held by us for our staff. Yes a very productive day in deed. We even sorted out folders on our server for staff to use and access and started looking at creating lessons in Easiteach for them. We were both very impressed with our efforts.

I have placed a link to our school’s acceptable use of computers and internet letters to parents on my links page. Feel free to have a look and comment on them.

Well on Friday we had our website training and we were so impressed with our new website we as in me decided to get the tech to make sure that when teachers log onto the web now  they are sent straight to the school’s new website, well what a drama!!! First noticed their was an issue when the first class came into the lab and couldn’t log onto their online testing as the old intranet/webpage had the link…..uh oh i thought!!!! Into panic mode i went, ringing the tech (who didn’t answer), contacting the Department’s ppl that organise the online testing. Anyway luckily the children’s computers in the classroom didn’t log in to the new website and still had the old intranet page as their home page so i managed to get the URL and get to the intranet page. Unfortunetly for the class that was in the lab by the time i had actually done this it was too late for them to complete any online testing. I promptly sent a note to all the 3-6 teachers with the old URL and set up a link to it on the new webpage, but boy was my name mud for those first few tense moments of the morning and first thing Monday morning with reports lingering…………but thankfully all fixed and that link came in very handy when students in my computer classes wanted to access their email while they waited for superclubsplus to work online again. Boy what a day!!! After the panic of the morning i then had to present to the TLMC a program i want to run throughout the school called Digital Excellence, i am not great at explaining but lucky for me the boss knew about the program and helped me out with explaining.  I guess i was very grateful that i kept my sense of humour in tact and that i wasn’t too tired after only having four hours sleep as i watch Pink perform her most awesome show live and then awoken by my daughter at 6am…….all in a days work for this ICT coordinator.

Yesterday i visited two schools as part of my TPL on the use of interactive whiteboards within schools. The first school was great, they have so much technology but there was little use, we only saw a max of 4 teachers using the boards. We did get some fantastic ideas about the use of Easiteach from one teacher. We then visited another school to look at their digital excellence program, a great program which we hopefully will run. Again this school was well equipped with technology and we saw it being used, the ICT coordinator was very impressive as was the school. I have a vision for our school that one day we too will be conducting school tours and be known for our ICT facilities and use of technology.

Today was a great day of learning. I spent the day at Firbank Grammar learning about Podcasts, thanks Alistar it was a great session.  I learnt how to create my own pod cast and created my own website using google sites. I am now looking for ideas on integration of podcasting into the curriculum for primary children. I learnt how to use Audacity and Alistar’s site is exceptionally handy. A great day of learning.

Today i thoroughly enjoyed my job. During my APT time i stumbled across several very useful and helpful wikis compiled by others on Web 2.0 tools. I was very thankful to Mark Richardson for tweeting me and giving me his blog address – http://ictedservices.typepad.com/icted_services/elearning-plans/, what a great site, so useful. From his site i further sumbled on to the VELS wiki, i didn’t even know there was one, but low and behold there is  http://vels.wikispaces.com/. and from there i went on to smsteacher wiki and access ability programs wiki. I also stumbled across wolfpham alpha. It certainly was an exciting hour, i was sad when i had to leave and go to my ICT committee meeting. It was a good meeting though quite a few people didn’t turn up ( i think they forgot as it wasn’t mentioned again). The meeting was just a brief one looking at what the school needs and to get ideas from staff.  So we shall wait and see. We did get the go ahead to contact editure to discuss having MySuite up and running for term 3 and 4, so i am again excited about that, plus we go live with our new website on the 28th of this month and then get trained in it on the 29th.  So a very eventful, productive and exciting day. Loving being ICT coordinator.