I feel like every time I sit down to write my year’s Professional Development Plan for school, I write something about technology. It’s not that I’m incompetent with technology; I feel more comfortable with it than most people. But there’s always room for improvement. So, I’m pleased that so much of my fellowship involved the use of technology.

Over the summer, through my hunt to tag 250 online resources, I needed to multi-task.  I needed to have a PDF file of the NC Summary rubric open by which I judged each resource. I needed to have a temporary excel spreadsheet open when I could paste URLs I wanted to return to and jot some notes. I needed to have tabs open for e-mail so I could ask questions of my team or mentors, for the back-end website I was uploading into, and for more than one resource at a time. Web searches can take you pretty far down the rabbit hole, so I found myself clicking ‘Open in a new tab’ more than anything else. Because I needed to go back and forth between so many different websites and programs, the Lenovo tablet worked great for me. I could write some notes from trainings in the OneNote app, scroll over to the web browser and tag resources, and switch to desktop mode to type in a Microsoft Office application.

My project wasn’t a lesson plan with students as end users; it was almost part-evaluation and part-PR. So, I created videos like this one or this one to answer some questions teachers were asking about how Home Base’s instructional resources were being chosen. I felt compelled to use Animoto, an application we’d exploring during NCCAT, to create an upbeat video in support of Home Base. Sometimes it was tough to cheer on a program that wasn’t being rolled out smoothly in every school, and to have your co-workers mistakenly believe you have some influence in making it better.

My experiences creating PR-style videos and moreover going through the harrowing process of screen-casting enabled me to use my technology in class to flip a class or have absent students review (sorry, that one’s on TeacherTube so it’s kid-friendly).