Arduous – Yes!

taskTASK: Reflect on the process (of creating curriculum) and describe how you’d like to see your lessons used both locally and at a larger scale.

 

 

Our ‘curriculum’ was not like everyone else’s. We don’t have lesson plans that we created that will be linked to the Kenan webpage for others to access. (http://kenanfellows.org/curriculum-project-list). Instead we have resources that are tagged, aligned to NC standards and sortable by keywords and stored in Home Base. Well, few daily users call it ‘Home Base’. Some say ‘Power Teacher. Others say ‘Power School’.  A few even call it ‘Grade Book’.

Home baseOur Home Base task last summer was to work on the computer and find free, online resources that meet the criteria of the NC Summary Rubric and tag them. Once tagged for publisher, grade level, duration, type of resource and other key words, the online resources we found were entered into Home Base. We talked resources, sought resources, read resources, rejected and accepted resources.

We looked forward to being the ambassadors for this new online platform. Sadly, my November goals of going from school to school to show teachers how to access Schoolnet’s Instructional school net logoMaterials had to be postponed. My goal had been to explain the search feature and to begin the process of recommending resources to a school bank and subsequently to a county bank. The thought of working across the county to designate particular online resources to support world language instruction was invigorating but would have to wait..

We Home Base fellows were anxious to see our “resources in Home Base” and to share them with our fellow teachers, schools and districts. That said, teachers I work with never talked about ‘Home Base’. They all referred to ‘Power School’ or ‘Power Teacher’. By the time I made my first formal presentation about these tagged resources at the Foreign Language Association of North Carolinaheadache fall ‘state conference in October 2014, the mention of ‘Power School’ brought painful memories to most. The initial difficulties with getting in to ‘Power School’, entering grades and printing report cards were the focus of the day.

Little known to most was that by clicking on the ‘Schoolnet’ link to the left of where you take your daily attendance, one could search for and view the resources that had been tagged by so many.

From the Home Base webinars in fall and spring, the number of ‘Instructional Materials’, as I learned to correctly say, kept rising and rising.

Our district must have experienced more difficulties than most. Through March, the Schoolnet link kept disappearing from district account users. Tickets would be placed and the link would return to disappear again. Come April, I was able to go to the various high schools and meet with world language teachers to show them how to find Schoolnet and how to search for resources, save them, upload your own resources or link, etc.

Power School Navigation 030314 no Schoolnet visibleNC state superintendent Dr. June Atkinson told the conference attendees at the NCTIES conference in March that like past transitions to new grading systems, people complained about the old one until the new one came along. Then, they wanted to return to the comfort of the old one they knew. She assured us that this learning curve will also soon pass.

Long story short, the Home Base platform has great potential. It comes at an appropriate time in 799px-Tesla_Model_S_Indoors_trimmed wikipediaour technological evolution. It has the potential to support many valuable cross-platform uses. Like the TESLA electric car or the SpaceX rocket, they too had some issues leaving the design studio. Let’s hope the stock in Home Base also rises and that the few bugs with the system are worked out swiftly.

One can see that the number of Instructional Materials in Schoolnet is increasing regularly. With the plans for the Governor’s Teachers’ Network to add instructional units with lesson plans and professional development modules, there is a serious opportunity for North Carolina educators to bond together to impact education in the state. I look forward to many people accessing Schoolnet AND contributing more instructional materials. This has been an opportunity to be involved with the launch of a massive, multi-faceted technology tool. Let’s hope it serves as a firm foundation, or base, from which to create a strong statewide digital bank with many useful resources and powerful digital tools,

foundation wall