Brenda+Mac

=**__Brenda MacDonald – District 18__**=

**Month: December 2006 & January 2007**
· PD support for the schools in our district · Complete website for Literacy Support Teachers for the Pre-Kindergarten age group · Setting up wiki’s with teachers at LHHS · South Devon Elementary visit to LHHS
 * Goals for the month:**


 * What did I do to bring about success in achieving your monthly goals?**
 * Worked with Cynthia Urquhart, Admin team from LHHS and South Devon Elementary to set up a visit for the Grade 5 students. Our hope for this that it will help students focus on not only their future education, but to get them thinking about career paths as well. This will also provide 2 school communities the opportunity to converse and connect. We also want to offer the opportunity for the students to interact positively with high school students. If this has a positive response it will be continued with Alexander Gibson Memorial School. Our plan is have 16 peer mentors from LHHS visit South Devon to speak to the students and get them excited about visiting the high school. We are planning on giving them t-shirts with something like Junior Lions on the front and Class of 2013. Our goal is to excite the students and get them using technology and we want to try and inspire them so that they remain in school.
 * Working with the Literacy Support Specialist and the literacy teachers to develop a new website for parents and children that will encourage the students to get prepared for school. The website is for children before they begin kindergarten and is very child friendly with Lenny the Lizard introducing them to fun things that they can do at home to get ready for school.
 * Our schools are really embracing the idea of having school based PD during teaching hours. Bryan is supporting the schools by providing release time for the teachers. We have come up with a model that is working very well. The school gets one or two supply teachers who then relieve a different teacher each period enabling the teacher to come to us for an hour of assistance. Wow, are the teachers ever excited to get such individualized help and it makes me feel good to know that they are feeling more comfortable with using technology. I believe that we are creating a real excitement in the teachers and helping them to realize that they can learn to use technology (smartboard, learning essentials, photostory, e-mail, portal, file management, etc).
 * Wiki’s are becoming more popular and teachers are beginning to ask more questions on how to create them to use with their classes. The technology and math departments of LHHS had a PD on wiki’s where they all created their own.


 * Accomplishments/Successes**
 * District Professional Development Series for the winter term has not started as of yet. We are currently finding that we are so busy in the schools doing PD during teaching hours that we haven’t had an opportunity to offer the evening sessions.
 * At the present time I am booked almost every day for the month of February with only a few Wednesday’s left but I am sure that they will disappear quickly.
 * Principals and their staff are expressing how much they appreciate having PD at their school and they love the opportunity to be able to attend during teaching hours.
 * I am feeling more and more privileged to work on the District 18 team. It is good to work with people who are always so ready to help each other. The support that we receive from Bryan is invaluable and he is always willing to help. Jeff and Carm have helped me out a lot with web pages, wiki’s, protopages and the list goes on and on. Dawn is an inspiration and is always in such a positive mood and has taught me so much and I can’t thank her enough for bailing me out many times with elementary report cards. After seeing the work and frustration that goes into those elementary report cards it makes me thankful that I teach high school.

· I am still finding teachers in schools who do not take their notebooks to school regularly although in one instance I asked the teacher how often she brought her notebook to school to which she quickly informed me quite proudly that she brought it every day. I asked her if she plugged it in to the network to which she quickly replied “Ohhh No, I wouldn’t do that”. I guess that was the reason that she had 50 updates that day when she went to shut down, it took her machine 1 ½ hours to update… Explained again the importance of not only bringing the notebook to school but also plugging it in to the network (not just the power supply). · Teachers understanding the value and use of saving their work in their own space on the network, teachers are still having difficulty understanding the difference between saving on their desktop and saving in their own personal folders. · Elementary report cards are still a challenge… getting teachers to understand how to back up their data file and not to be making multiple copies… read carefully the messages that are given when you synchronize. · Work on our team website is a slow process. We are never in the office at the same time so find it difficult to collaborate on this project. · Encouraging teacher’s to call their tech problems into the help desk · Many teachers are not comfortable and have difficulty using the touchpads on their notebooks, wish they would just go buy a mouse or that one had been provided with the notebook. For some reason they think that it will make them look odd if they have a mouse, so I guess many of us are odd, me included.
 * Challenges:**