Internship Journal
ET 691 Internship Journal
David M. Maimone
August 29, 2018
Met with Brenda about the internship project. Laid out the timeline and the major parts including both working with our staff to develop online PD as well as creating short, tutorial videos for professional development topics. Brenda seemed very excited about the video aspect. She asked about and we discussed possible topics. I haven’t decided on the topics yet but will do so in the next month or so. Brenda gave me the verbal “go ahead” to begin working with OSE staff. Because of the nature of my internship project, I think I will make individual action plans for each participant to track our work.
8/31/2018
Had my first meeting with the AA (additional adult) committee. The focus of this committee was how OSE could train our additional adults. While I’m not on the committee, I was invited because part of the training will involve video. Brenda thought it would be a good idea if I listened to what the committee wanted to do and see if I could support them with using technology to create a video tutorial for them. Dan, Jackie, and Robin are going to shoot video of scenarios that they would like to use in training. My thoughts were that I could teach them how to video edit as well as caption their video. After listening to the discussion, none of the members of this committee had that knowledge. Once I get the video footage I can work with them to edit, caption, and produce their video. I will need to determine the best software with which to do this. One of my goals will be to figure out what program I will use.
9/7/18
Met with Linda for the first time. Linda is tasked with presenting to special education department chairs on 10/23 and 10/25 on the new Placement Document procedures. Over the summer Linda, Jason, and Tom developed a professional development PowerPoint for the new Placement Document that OSE will be rolling out. This is something that will be presented face to face. However, Brenda (coordinator) and Rebecca (director) want this presentation to be on the OSE website and on Schoology for other OSE staff to be able to review or reference. The task here was to take the existing presentation and create a version to be viewed online. Linda and I talked about the process and set a date for 9/11/18 to meet to begin work on this project. One thing that I have realized, even though this is early in the internship, is that regardless of how I envisioned this internship to go, there are outside forces that can always impact it. In my case, I realize that I’m at the whim of the OSE leadership. Even though this is a change from what I initially intended, this project will fit well into my internship. I’m a big concerned about the time deadline due to the fact that it is difficult to find time to meet with my coworkers on a regular basis.
9/21/2018
Met with Jason from the ESY committee. Jason is a specialist in our office and is working on revising a PowerPoint that was used during a face to face professional development last June for teachers working in Extended School Year (ESY). Rebecca, the OSE director, wants to have that presentation be able to be delivered online similar to the one I’m working on with Linda. I worked with Jason on three things. First, I taught him how to use Screen-Cast-O-Matic to record the presentation in a video format. The second thing we worked on was the audio. After working on the scriptwriting and the timings, this was recorded directly on the PowerPoint. I was able to walk Jason through the process of organizing the text. Jason’s tech skills are pretty good so he was able to pick up this new tool fairly quickly. We were able to go over the basics of the software as well as organize and write the script. I find that while everyone I’ve worked with so far is excited and motivated about their individual projects, I feel that Linda will be the one that I need to spend the most time with. It is very interesting in that none of the three individuals that I am currently working with has a direct knowledge of making videos or webinars, they do vary in their ability and comfort level with technology in general. Jason and Jackie will have no trouble picking up the tech and learning it. I feel at this point, that Linda will be where most of my time will be spent.
9/26/2018
Worked with Jason again today on captioning the video. This seemed a bit trickier as we used the captioning feature in Screencast-o-matic. This software has a voice to text feature so it was able to caption the video from the audio that Jason recorded last time we met. However, the voice to text was not perfect and we needed to go into each slide and edit the text as well as the timings. This worked well but was very time consuming. We worked for about two and a half hours and only got through about a third of the video. However, I feel confident that now that Jason knows the process that he will be able to finish without me with him. I will plan on checking in with him when he is done to review the finished product.
10/1/18
Met with Brenda today to check in about the internship. This was a brief meeting. I updated her that I have not yet received the video from Jackie for the AA tutorial. Brenda said that she would follow up on that. It’s funny because this was such a big charge in our office about a month ago. I feel like at this point, I’m not sure if that is going to happen. Unless there is constant pressure from the leadership to get these videos made, they probably won’t happen anytime soon. Looking back, once the school year really got rolling, everyone in our office got tied up with their day to day job responsibilities and the making of the videos got pushed to the back burner. This is something that I did think about at the beginning but, for whatever reason, didn’t think would be an issue. I just assumed that we would schedule time to get this work going. When I talked with Jackie, it wasn’t that she didn’t want to do the videos, it was just that she was so busy with everything else that this was not a top priority. I understand that and I know that this may get pushed back to later in the school year. Otherwise, Brenda was very happy with the progress on the ESY PD that Jason and I are working on recording and captioning. Brenda has been very helpful and offered any support that I needed. At this point I feel that I’m on track with working with individuals in my office but I haven’t started the tutorial videos that I wanted to create. That will be my goal for the next few weeks.
10/10/2018
Worked with Linda P. today. The presentation we are working on is a new document that IEP chairs will need to complete when requesting a different placement for a student. Similar to the ESY PowerPoint that I’m working on with Jason, this presentation has been developed with PowerPoint with the intention of being delivered face to face. What Linda has requested is two-fold. First, with the face to face presentation, she wants a way to assess the participant’s learning and to be able to look at performance data. Secondly, she wants a way to record the presentation so that IEP chairs who could not attend the face to face session could still get the information and so that we can post it online as a reference to any of the chairs who may need it. When Linda first came to me about this, she presented it to me as a task for me to do. That really wasn’t the point of the internship. I know that I can do those things, but the goal for this is to teach and empower others in the office to gain the technology skills and comfort level to use tech in their professional development. What I learned here is that when you can work with technology, people will come to you and just ask you to do work for them. This is not something that I foresaw when I began. My goal is to empower and teach our OSE staff to be able to use the technology for themselves, not just do it for them. I think this stems from a “fear” of technology and a discomfort with change. I know in our program at Loyola we did learn about that, but it is very interesting to see that play out in real life. Everyone really is at a different point with their tech skills and comfort. I feel that working with people individually may be the best way to assess that and begin to change that mindset. So, I offered to work with and teach Linda how do to both of those things. She agreed, and we set a time on 10/18 to begin.
10/12/2018
Met with Linda today. We found this time prior to the 10/18 date we initially set. The PowerPoint was already completed and approved by OSE leadership. Now it was time to work on recording it and developing and online assessment tool. Since the face to face presentations were coming up in about a week, we decided to work on the assessment piece first. Unlike Jason, Linda is not as tech savvy, nor does she have the comfort level with technology. So, I thought I would choose a tool that most teachers are familiar with and that is relatively easy to use, Kahoot. I figured the benefit of using Kahoot would be that when Linda is presenting and doing the assessment, she won’t need to spend a lot of time teaching the participants how to use it since most of them are already familiar. Even if they aren’t, it is do easy for participants to use that it would be perfect for Linda. Plus, my plan is to be there with her when she presents so if there are any snags I can help and support. We went into Kahoot and I showed Linda how to enter in questions. This actually proved to be a little problematic because Kahoot limits the amount of characters for each question, so Linda had to revise some of her wording to fit within the character limit. Once we were able to get the questions in, I showed her how to adjust the settings and we played a practice round. To do this we needed two computers as she would run the Kahoot and I would act as a participant and answer the questions. It worked smoothly. I showed Linda how to start the Kahoot and get the numerical code that the participants would need to use.
The second part of this was to figure out how to get data from this. Now, this is something that I never have done so this was new learning for me. The great thing about Kahoot is that it automatically generates this data for download. After playing around with the settings, I figured out how to download the participant data to Excel. It was a pretty simple process that I was able to teach to Linda. One question we had is that if we were to give the Kahoot over multiple sessions, would we be able to get accumulated data. This is something I’ll need to research and figure out before the IEP chair meetings.
10/15/18
Continued to work on Jason with the captioning and it went well for the first two-thirds of the presentation. However, in the final third, for some reason, the automatic captioning feature and the timings of the slides were not synched up. There were times when the slide would move forward but the audio was still on the previous slide. The strange thing about this was that up to this point the text and the audio were virtually perfectly in synch and the only thing that Jason had to do was to make sure the speech to text was correct. Now we had a problem and I wasn’t sure how to fix it. We looked online for a solution but were unable to find one. What we ended up doing was deleting all the captioning text that was on those last few slides and entering it in manually. While I will still try to figure out why this happened, we needed to get this finished for OSE leadership. This took a very long time even though it was for only about six minutes of the actual presentation. I still don’t know what happened with the recording to make it go out of synch but at least we were able to fix it. I am familiar with all of the tech tools that we are using however, and I know that there can be issues with using technology, but this is one I didn’t predict. I don’t know if it had something to do with the transition from the PowerPoint, or if Jason’s speech wasn’t getting picked up. Not sure. Glad we planned enough time to account for these setbacks.
10/23/2018
Today was the first day of our IEP chair meetings. We did six sessions today and I went to support Linda with the Kahoot assessment and with the data collection. The presentation went great and when it was time to do the first Kahoot, Linda pulled it up and was able to get the code without my help. She also was able to get all of the participant onto the Kahoot. Believe me, for Linda, this was a big accomplishment considering her comfort level with technology. The Kahoot assessment took about 5 minutes and when the session was over, I did need to show Linda how to download the data again. She forgot. One of the problems we ran into today was the fact that with each of the six sessions, we needed to generate a new game of Kahoot. This meant that when we downloaded the data, we had to do it separately for each session. While this is not ideal, it is manageable. I was hoping we could have just a single file with all the data on how the participants did. We will just need to take the data from all six sessions and compile it by hand. At this point, I haven’t been able to come up with a technology solution to this. But overall, I’m super proud of Linda and her ability to pull this off. There is no way that three months ago she would have felt comfortable enough to lead an online assessment for a PD.
10/26/2018
Met with Brenda again to review progress with the internship. Just like the first time we met, she was very happy with the progress I’ve been making with OSE staff. Up to this point it’s been Linda and Jason. I still haven’t gotten the video footage for the AA PD. Brenda did follow up and let me know that Jackie, Dan, and Robin are not finished recording yet. This may end up being problematic, not for them, but for me with the internship. If I don’t have the video shortly, I may run out of time to complete that prior to the 12/1 deadline. I still haven’t started planning the video tutorials for the office. That is something that I wanted to do during the month of October but I’ve been very busy working with OSE staff. That will be something I will work on in the next week or two for sure. Brenda wasn’t upset about that and understood.
I’ve decided that it is a shame that out district doesn’t support Google-based apps because the new Google Slides has a captioning feature that is very good. Within our network we cannot always log into our Google drives so it is not possible to use that on a consistent basis. The reason I say this is that this afternoon I worked again with Linda P. to take that IEP Chair Placement PD and work on recording and captioning it. The funny thing is that Linda was good with doing all aspects of this except having her voice on the recording. She even presented this to the IEP chairs. Because she was uncomfortable with that, she asked if Jason could record. I told her that would be okay but that I wanted her to be there so she could learn the process. She was fine with that and was actually excited to see how it was done. Just like with the previous recording I did with Jason, I started out with Linda by helping her organize and write a script. Once she had that we recorded the screencast. Jason read the script while it was recording. Linda watched the process and even worked the screencast controls to start, stop, and save the recording. Once the recording was complete, I worked with Linda to caption it. Like the previous PD we did, this part was time consuming. We did not get far on that part today. I set another time to work with Linda because unlike Jason who I felt comfortable completing the process on his own, I felt Linda still needed support. We set a block of time for 11/2.
11/2/2018
At this point, I feel pretty good with the part of the internship that has me working with OSE staff. I’ve worked with two staff members to completely produce an online version of their face to face professional developments. I’m still waiting on the video from the other project but there is not much I can do on that until I get the footage. The next step now is to work on the short video tutorials for our office. I’m a little worried that I’m behind on that. I feel as if I underestimated the time aspect a little bit. Not so much about how much time it would take to work with staff and do their projects with them, but the amount of days, that because of other commitments or things that come up, I couldn’t put any time toward the internship. I feel I should have given more time to plan and create these OSE tutorials. I know I’ll get them finished, I just wish I would have thought that out better.
Linda and I continued to work on the video captioning. I feel as if Linda has the overall gist of what to do to caption the video. Once I felt that Linda could do the captioning, I let her go. I checked in on her periodically throughout the afternoon and she was doing fine. We did not have the same issue we had with Jason’s PD of the narration and the captioning getting out of sync. This particular project went much smoother.
11/15/18
I’ve begun to work on the video tutorial for our office. I needed to change one of the topics for the tutorials due to a suggestion from our coordinator, Brenda. Instead of doing the tutorial on accountability, she thought it be better that I develop a tutorial on using Screencast-o-matic, and then hold the accountability for a later time. I am okay with this because I haven’t started planning the accountability tutorial yet. At this point, I am ready to record two of the three tutorials.
11/18/18
Finished all three video tutorials this weekend. Surprisingly, they I didn’t hit many snags in that process. I found that since I had planned each one out that when I went to record it minimized the number of times I needed to do retakes. I feel that these are pretty solid tutorials. I kept them short and focused (two things that I know adult learners need). I believe that these will be valuable tools and resources for our office going forward with PD. In fact, Brenda asked me last Friday if I would present some of these to our staff at one of our staff meetings in January. I am waiting on OSE leadership to review these tutorials before they are put on the OSE website and Schoology.
11/23/18
Spent the last two weeks working on the Internship Presentation and putting the final touches on the website. This proved to be a much more daunting task as I did run into more issues with this longer recording. I was planned out well, just like I was with the shorter videos, however, I found that for some reason, I needed to redo a lot of the takes. I will say that I’m glad that I gave myself two weeks to get this finished. There is no way I could have done this had I started two or three days before the end. One of my biggest takeaways from the internship is that people always can’t do what they say. While everyone I worked with was enthusiastic, our schedules often got in the way of meeting to work. Things often got pushed back which threw timelines off. I knew that may happen, I just wasn’t prepared for the extent of that. The one thing I will say with this project, particularly the one I did was that I did feel as if I used a lot of information and tools that I learned over the course of the program here at Loyola. I used tech skills such as building a website and utilized a number of tech tools (Kahoot!, Screencast, Movie Maker, Google Docs, YouTube,. Sutori). In addition, I used online collaboration sites such as Google Docs and Microsoft Online and Zoom to consult with colleagues in the program for support. I learned to use WebEx as a delivery platform for webinars (although I didn’t get to this with my participants, it was something that we reviewed for the future). I also incorporated both leadership skills that I learned as well as knowledge of the adult learner. I can honestly say that during the individual sessions with OSE staff and when creating the online tutorials that I felt both knowledgeable and confident in my abilities to achieve my goals. There is no way that I could have done that two years ago.
David M. Maimone
August 29, 2018
Met with Brenda about the internship project. Laid out the timeline and the major parts including both working with our staff to develop online PD as well as creating short, tutorial videos for professional development topics. Brenda seemed very excited about the video aspect. She asked about and we discussed possible topics. I haven’t decided on the topics yet but will do so in the next month or so. Brenda gave me the verbal “go ahead” to begin working with OSE staff. Because of the nature of my internship project, I think I will make individual action plans for each participant to track our work.
8/31/2018
Had my first meeting with the AA (additional adult) committee. The focus of this committee was how OSE could train our additional adults. While I’m not on the committee, I was invited because part of the training will involve video. Brenda thought it would be a good idea if I listened to what the committee wanted to do and see if I could support them with using technology to create a video tutorial for them. Dan, Jackie, and Robin are going to shoot video of scenarios that they would like to use in training. My thoughts were that I could teach them how to video edit as well as caption their video. After listening to the discussion, none of the members of this committee had that knowledge. Once I get the video footage I can work with them to edit, caption, and produce their video. I will need to determine the best software with which to do this. One of my goals will be to figure out what program I will use.
9/7/18
Met with Linda for the first time. Linda is tasked with presenting to special education department chairs on 10/23 and 10/25 on the new Placement Document procedures. Over the summer Linda, Jason, and Tom developed a professional development PowerPoint for the new Placement Document that OSE will be rolling out. This is something that will be presented face to face. However, Brenda (coordinator) and Rebecca (director) want this presentation to be on the OSE website and on Schoology for other OSE staff to be able to review or reference. The task here was to take the existing presentation and create a version to be viewed online. Linda and I talked about the process and set a date for 9/11/18 to meet to begin work on this project. One thing that I have realized, even though this is early in the internship, is that regardless of how I envisioned this internship to go, there are outside forces that can always impact it. In my case, I realize that I’m at the whim of the OSE leadership. Even though this is a change from what I initially intended, this project will fit well into my internship. I’m a big concerned about the time deadline due to the fact that it is difficult to find time to meet with my coworkers on a regular basis.
9/21/2018
Met with Jason from the ESY committee. Jason is a specialist in our office and is working on revising a PowerPoint that was used during a face to face professional development last June for teachers working in Extended School Year (ESY). Rebecca, the OSE director, wants to have that presentation be able to be delivered online similar to the one I’m working on with Linda. I worked with Jason on three things. First, I taught him how to use Screen-Cast-O-Matic to record the presentation in a video format. The second thing we worked on was the audio. After working on the scriptwriting and the timings, this was recorded directly on the PowerPoint. I was able to walk Jason through the process of organizing the text. Jason’s tech skills are pretty good so he was able to pick up this new tool fairly quickly. We were able to go over the basics of the software as well as organize and write the script. I find that while everyone I’ve worked with so far is excited and motivated about their individual projects, I feel that Linda will be the one that I need to spend the most time with. It is very interesting in that none of the three individuals that I am currently working with has a direct knowledge of making videos or webinars, they do vary in their ability and comfort level with technology in general. Jason and Jackie will have no trouble picking up the tech and learning it. I feel at this point, that Linda will be where most of my time will be spent.
9/26/2018
Worked with Jason again today on captioning the video. This seemed a bit trickier as we used the captioning feature in Screencast-o-matic. This software has a voice to text feature so it was able to caption the video from the audio that Jason recorded last time we met. However, the voice to text was not perfect and we needed to go into each slide and edit the text as well as the timings. This worked well but was very time consuming. We worked for about two and a half hours and only got through about a third of the video. However, I feel confident that now that Jason knows the process that he will be able to finish without me with him. I will plan on checking in with him when he is done to review the finished product.
10/1/18
Met with Brenda today to check in about the internship. This was a brief meeting. I updated her that I have not yet received the video from Jackie for the AA tutorial. Brenda said that she would follow up on that. It’s funny because this was such a big charge in our office about a month ago. I feel like at this point, I’m not sure if that is going to happen. Unless there is constant pressure from the leadership to get these videos made, they probably won’t happen anytime soon. Looking back, once the school year really got rolling, everyone in our office got tied up with their day to day job responsibilities and the making of the videos got pushed to the back burner. This is something that I did think about at the beginning but, for whatever reason, didn’t think would be an issue. I just assumed that we would schedule time to get this work going. When I talked with Jackie, it wasn’t that she didn’t want to do the videos, it was just that she was so busy with everything else that this was not a top priority. I understand that and I know that this may get pushed back to later in the school year. Otherwise, Brenda was very happy with the progress on the ESY PD that Jason and I are working on recording and captioning. Brenda has been very helpful and offered any support that I needed. At this point I feel that I’m on track with working with individuals in my office but I haven’t started the tutorial videos that I wanted to create. That will be my goal for the next few weeks.
10/10/2018
Worked with Linda P. today. The presentation we are working on is a new document that IEP chairs will need to complete when requesting a different placement for a student. Similar to the ESY PowerPoint that I’m working on with Jason, this presentation has been developed with PowerPoint with the intention of being delivered face to face. What Linda has requested is two-fold. First, with the face to face presentation, she wants a way to assess the participant’s learning and to be able to look at performance data. Secondly, she wants a way to record the presentation so that IEP chairs who could not attend the face to face session could still get the information and so that we can post it online as a reference to any of the chairs who may need it. When Linda first came to me about this, she presented it to me as a task for me to do. That really wasn’t the point of the internship. I know that I can do those things, but the goal for this is to teach and empower others in the office to gain the technology skills and comfort level to use tech in their professional development. What I learned here is that when you can work with technology, people will come to you and just ask you to do work for them. This is not something that I foresaw when I began. My goal is to empower and teach our OSE staff to be able to use the technology for themselves, not just do it for them. I think this stems from a “fear” of technology and a discomfort with change. I know in our program at Loyola we did learn about that, but it is very interesting to see that play out in real life. Everyone really is at a different point with their tech skills and comfort. I feel that working with people individually may be the best way to assess that and begin to change that mindset. So, I offered to work with and teach Linda how do to both of those things. She agreed, and we set a time on 10/18 to begin.
10/12/2018
Met with Linda today. We found this time prior to the 10/18 date we initially set. The PowerPoint was already completed and approved by OSE leadership. Now it was time to work on recording it and developing and online assessment tool. Since the face to face presentations were coming up in about a week, we decided to work on the assessment piece first. Unlike Jason, Linda is not as tech savvy, nor does she have the comfort level with technology. So, I thought I would choose a tool that most teachers are familiar with and that is relatively easy to use, Kahoot. I figured the benefit of using Kahoot would be that when Linda is presenting and doing the assessment, she won’t need to spend a lot of time teaching the participants how to use it since most of them are already familiar. Even if they aren’t, it is do easy for participants to use that it would be perfect for Linda. Plus, my plan is to be there with her when she presents so if there are any snags I can help and support. We went into Kahoot and I showed Linda how to enter in questions. This actually proved to be a little problematic because Kahoot limits the amount of characters for each question, so Linda had to revise some of her wording to fit within the character limit. Once we were able to get the questions in, I showed her how to adjust the settings and we played a practice round. To do this we needed two computers as she would run the Kahoot and I would act as a participant and answer the questions. It worked smoothly. I showed Linda how to start the Kahoot and get the numerical code that the participants would need to use.
The second part of this was to figure out how to get data from this. Now, this is something that I never have done so this was new learning for me. The great thing about Kahoot is that it automatically generates this data for download. After playing around with the settings, I figured out how to download the participant data to Excel. It was a pretty simple process that I was able to teach to Linda. One question we had is that if we were to give the Kahoot over multiple sessions, would we be able to get accumulated data. This is something I’ll need to research and figure out before the IEP chair meetings.
10/15/18
Continued to work on Jason with the captioning and it went well for the first two-thirds of the presentation. However, in the final third, for some reason, the automatic captioning feature and the timings of the slides were not synched up. There were times when the slide would move forward but the audio was still on the previous slide. The strange thing about this was that up to this point the text and the audio were virtually perfectly in synch and the only thing that Jason had to do was to make sure the speech to text was correct. Now we had a problem and I wasn’t sure how to fix it. We looked online for a solution but were unable to find one. What we ended up doing was deleting all the captioning text that was on those last few slides and entering it in manually. While I will still try to figure out why this happened, we needed to get this finished for OSE leadership. This took a very long time even though it was for only about six minutes of the actual presentation. I still don’t know what happened with the recording to make it go out of synch but at least we were able to fix it. I am familiar with all of the tech tools that we are using however, and I know that there can be issues with using technology, but this is one I didn’t predict. I don’t know if it had something to do with the transition from the PowerPoint, or if Jason’s speech wasn’t getting picked up. Not sure. Glad we planned enough time to account for these setbacks.
10/23/2018
Today was the first day of our IEP chair meetings. We did six sessions today and I went to support Linda with the Kahoot assessment and with the data collection. The presentation went great and when it was time to do the first Kahoot, Linda pulled it up and was able to get the code without my help. She also was able to get all of the participant onto the Kahoot. Believe me, for Linda, this was a big accomplishment considering her comfort level with technology. The Kahoot assessment took about 5 minutes and when the session was over, I did need to show Linda how to download the data again. She forgot. One of the problems we ran into today was the fact that with each of the six sessions, we needed to generate a new game of Kahoot. This meant that when we downloaded the data, we had to do it separately for each session. While this is not ideal, it is manageable. I was hoping we could have just a single file with all the data on how the participants did. We will just need to take the data from all six sessions and compile it by hand. At this point, I haven’t been able to come up with a technology solution to this. But overall, I’m super proud of Linda and her ability to pull this off. There is no way that three months ago she would have felt comfortable enough to lead an online assessment for a PD.
10/26/2018
Met with Brenda again to review progress with the internship. Just like the first time we met, she was very happy with the progress I’ve been making with OSE staff. Up to this point it’s been Linda and Jason. I still haven’t gotten the video footage for the AA PD. Brenda did follow up and let me know that Jackie, Dan, and Robin are not finished recording yet. This may end up being problematic, not for them, but for me with the internship. If I don’t have the video shortly, I may run out of time to complete that prior to the 12/1 deadline. I still haven’t started planning the video tutorials for the office. That is something that I wanted to do during the month of October but I’ve been very busy working with OSE staff. That will be something I will work on in the next week or two for sure. Brenda wasn’t upset about that and understood.
I’ve decided that it is a shame that out district doesn’t support Google-based apps because the new Google Slides has a captioning feature that is very good. Within our network we cannot always log into our Google drives so it is not possible to use that on a consistent basis. The reason I say this is that this afternoon I worked again with Linda P. to take that IEP Chair Placement PD and work on recording and captioning it. The funny thing is that Linda was good with doing all aspects of this except having her voice on the recording. She even presented this to the IEP chairs. Because she was uncomfortable with that, she asked if Jason could record. I told her that would be okay but that I wanted her to be there so she could learn the process. She was fine with that and was actually excited to see how it was done. Just like with the previous recording I did with Jason, I started out with Linda by helping her organize and write a script. Once she had that we recorded the screencast. Jason read the script while it was recording. Linda watched the process and even worked the screencast controls to start, stop, and save the recording. Once the recording was complete, I worked with Linda to caption it. Like the previous PD we did, this part was time consuming. We did not get far on that part today. I set another time to work with Linda because unlike Jason who I felt comfortable completing the process on his own, I felt Linda still needed support. We set a block of time for 11/2.
11/2/2018
At this point, I feel pretty good with the part of the internship that has me working with OSE staff. I’ve worked with two staff members to completely produce an online version of their face to face professional developments. I’m still waiting on the video from the other project but there is not much I can do on that until I get the footage. The next step now is to work on the short video tutorials for our office. I’m a little worried that I’m behind on that. I feel as if I underestimated the time aspect a little bit. Not so much about how much time it would take to work with staff and do their projects with them, but the amount of days, that because of other commitments or things that come up, I couldn’t put any time toward the internship. I feel I should have given more time to plan and create these OSE tutorials. I know I’ll get them finished, I just wish I would have thought that out better.
Linda and I continued to work on the video captioning. I feel as if Linda has the overall gist of what to do to caption the video. Once I felt that Linda could do the captioning, I let her go. I checked in on her periodically throughout the afternoon and she was doing fine. We did not have the same issue we had with Jason’s PD of the narration and the captioning getting out of sync. This particular project went much smoother.
11/15/18
I’ve begun to work on the video tutorial for our office. I needed to change one of the topics for the tutorials due to a suggestion from our coordinator, Brenda. Instead of doing the tutorial on accountability, she thought it be better that I develop a tutorial on using Screencast-o-matic, and then hold the accountability for a later time. I am okay with this because I haven’t started planning the accountability tutorial yet. At this point, I am ready to record two of the three tutorials.
11/18/18
Finished all three video tutorials this weekend. Surprisingly, they I didn’t hit many snags in that process. I found that since I had planned each one out that when I went to record it minimized the number of times I needed to do retakes. I feel that these are pretty solid tutorials. I kept them short and focused (two things that I know adult learners need). I believe that these will be valuable tools and resources for our office going forward with PD. In fact, Brenda asked me last Friday if I would present some of these to our staff at one of our staff meetings in January. I am waiting on OSE leadership to review these tutorials before they are put on the OSE website and Schoology.
11/23/18
Spent the last two weeks working on the Internship Presentation and putting the final touches on the website. This proved to be a much more daunting task as I did run into more issues with this longer recording. I was planned out well, just like I was with the shorter videos, however, I found that for some reason, I needed to redo a lot of the takes. I will say that I’m glad that I gave myself two weeks to get this finished. There is no way I could have done this had I started two or three days before the end. One of my biggest takeaways from the internship is that people always can’t do what they say. While everyone I worked with was enthusiastic, our schedules often got in the way of meeting to work. Things often got pushed back which threw timelines off. I knew that may happen, I just wasn’t prepared for the extent of that. The one thing I will say with this project, particularly the one I did was that I did feel as if I used a lot of information and tools that I learned over the course of the program here at Loyola. I used tech skills such as building a website and utilized a number of tech tools (Kahoot!, Screencast, Movie Maker, Google Docs, YouTube,. Sutori). In addition, I used online collaboration sites such as Google Docs and Microsoft Online and Zoom to consult with colleagues in the program for support. I learned to use WebEx as a delivery platform for webinars (although I didn’t get to this with my participants, it was something that we reviewed for the future). I also incorporated both leadership skills that I learned as well as knowledge of the adult learner. I can honestly say that during the individual sessions with OSE staff and when creating the online tutorials that I felt both knowledgeable and confident in my abilities to achieve my goals. There is no way that I could have done that two years ago.