October post

During the month of October, I was busy learning many new technology things. The first thing I did was to attend with my CTE Director WorkKeys certification training at WVUP at Parkersburg. We attended a one day training session for the online portion of the WorkKeys test. I am now a certified proctor for both the paper and pencil and the online portion of the WorkKeys test. Two days after that I went to the state DECA advisors academy and became certified to be a DECA advisor. Even though the main emphasis was not on technology, we discussed many ways in which to implement technology in Business and Marketing classes and ways in which technology is used at the competition level. For example, students create electronic portfolios to be used at the state competition. The following two school days I was a member of our school leadership team that attended the regional High Schools That Work data workshop at Lakeview in Morgantown. Technology use in the classroom was definitely a major topic in our sharing sessions there. The technology focus team at our school hosted a MOBI training for teachers at our school during October with Mike Semones from eInstruction. I finally installed my software and am now able to use my classroom set of MOBIs, and they are now ready to let other teachers use them also. I then attended an afternoon training session at Job Force in Morgantown on KeyTrain with my CTE Director. We are now able to set up our students accounts for KeyTrain online. We have given all of our completers and many other juniors and seniors the Quick Guide pretest. Now they are able to do their assignments online either at school or at home. I helped teachers get all of their students through the first round of Acuity benchmark testing, and we are now preparing for the second round. Marian Covey, coordinator for WV HSTW came to our school and helped our leadership team, of which I am a member, get all of our teachers through their online survey. We are now preparing for our technical appraisal visit, and I was asked to go on a technical appraisal visit to another school in February. If you have never done this before, it is a good way to get lots of good ideas (especially in the area of technology). I don't think I could fit any more into a month!