Technology Standards Blog

After reviewing the state technology standards, I believe our school is meeting these requirements with the help of every department. One area our social studies department contributes to reaching these state standards is the use of our mobile lab and comparing and contrasting how technology changes society. In my world geography class, I have students do some reasearch on underdeveloped, developing, and developed countries and their use of technology. The students find after reading a few short articles and interperting some graphs that the more developed the country is the higher usage of technology their citizens use. From education, to business, to agriculture, the students learn that technology is becoming just as important as natural resources. In other classes such as business, I know they hit a lot of the standards. Such as internet job searches, online surveys, and using business week online. The only standard I question whether or not we meet is analyzing the intended and unintended impacts of a system. I know we would hit the intended part with discussions of technology use by various countries and the impact it has had on changing their soceity, but I am unaware of anyone discussing the unintended part. That is something I will have to research.

Overall I think we are doing a fairly good job as a school to meet the growing technological needs of our students.

Technology Practicum- School Technology

The big push at Lincoln High School along with the other high schools in the district is the use of smart boards. Recently we had a department meeting witht the rest of thd district and we were given an introductory piece on the capabilites of the smartboard. Smartboard installations was supposed to happen this summer in our department, but unfortunately that got pushed back two years. We are one of the last departments to have them installed in the classrooms. So in the next two years, we will have some more in depth training and will also be offered additional training on weekends and after school to make the transition smooth and make us smartboard ready by fall 2009. This was obviously the major piece of information I recieved and other updates, software programs, etc. are on hold because of the sheer cost of the smartboards. The district really sees a value in the smartboard tool and envisions one in every classroom in the near future.