Recap - End of Fall Semester

As the semester wound down, we decided to have a final meeting with Marcie to decide what our project would be for the Spring semester. Initially, we had thought of hosting workshops for Peck teachers, although the Arts Integration Work Group had also reached out to us as they were hoping to establish an online resource for their "arts in the classroom" initiatives.

At the conclusion of the meeting, a few potential workshop topics were established:

1. Grade book with Excel
2. Finding Resources on the Internet (a session on helpful websites)
3. SmartBoard Workshop
4. Digital Story Telling
5. A workshop on Word and PowerPoint

We also wanted to help with the Arts Integration group, and hopefully will be able to help them set up some sort of database. Marcie as well as Professor Soules mentioned using a wikispace/wiki.

Our preliminary plans for the upcoming few months:

January

1. Paper survey distributed to teachers during January (after their winter break). We will communicate via Google docs over the break to set this up. Marcie has a survey that we can use as a template.
2. Get in contact with Priscilla. Possibly meet to understand the needs of Arts Integration Group.
3. Using Google Docs, we can begin to brainstorm ideas for the workshops

February /March 

1. We will start hosting the workshops. It's most likely that they will be held on Tue, Wed, or Thur at 3:30. We will be holding approx. one per week during February and March.

During the long winter break, our goals are to continue to brainstorm about the workshops, and to stay in touch with Marcie as she continues to work on the technology survey that will be distributed to teachers at the school.

Meeting with Megan at Peck!

On Friday November 18th at 3:30, we drove down to Holyoke to have our first meeting with Megan at the Peck School. Marci had a meeting until 3 so we got started with Megan before she got there. We filled her in on some of the things we had discussed with Marci including the multi-week workshops and the survey that we would want to do to see where the different teachers are in their skill levels.

We talked about the survey that the students did last year to figure out what classes the teachers would like to do. Our goal is to use parts of that survey and add our own questions to get the most information from the teachers. Megan said that we might want to include the other full service schools in Holyoke if we have enough room. The ideas our group has for classes include a multi-week excel workshop, smartboards, and digital storytelling.

For each of the classes, we will create documentation so that teachers can reference them after the classes are over. Our only concern for the documentation is that we are not sure where to host them yet. As a group, we will research different options for hosting the documentation including edutube for videos and using the Peck website for PDFs.

The final thing that we discussed with Megan was the possibility of bringing Personal Response Devices (PRSs) to the school. This would be a good way for teachers to check for understanding in the classroom. We are going to look into the possibility of getting devices donated or purchasing a set of them for Peck.

The next steps for our project are to do a needs assessment. We will create a survey with Marcie to send to the teachers and meet with Megan once we have the results to get a better idea of our classes and the curriculum for each class. We also need to research different hosting options for our documentation and options for bringing PRS devices to the school.

~Peck Tech Team

Our First Meeting

Once we finally sorted out the whole Kelsey-Kelsey debacle, Laura joined our team and it was full speed ahead!

We met Tuesday, November 8th with Marcie in Furcolo Hall, the education building. We decided to arrive a little bit early so that we could discuss team norms as well as schedule good meeting times before speaking with her.

In general, we found that Tuesday right after class, Wednesday morning, and Friday in the late afternoon work best. Tuesday will be our primary meeting time, while the other two days will serve as backup times should we run into any snags. I was designated tech lead, while Janey volunteered to be the main contact person (between our group and Megan/Marcie).

After meeting with Marcie, we had a better idea of what we'd be working on as the initial description given to us was kind of vague. Essentially, we would be helping her develop teaching workshops for the teachers over at Peck to help them simplify the everyday tasks they have to perform (such as creating a gradebook, which can be done in Microsoft Excel to save time). Ideas were also hatched to create training videos to help promote sustainability after these workshops end - this is to ensure that any teachers who forget what they were taught, or ones that were unable to attend any of the workshops altogether can teach the material themselves. The initial challenges that Marcie anticipated were the varying technical skill levels among teachers slowing the process down, as well as working around the teachers' schedules as these were issues with the workshops they held the previous year.

While we are still unclear on all the details, hopefully we'll be able to visualize a more concrete project once we meet with Megan at Peck and hear firsthand about their needs.