There were so many Aha moments at my externship that I cannot really tell where the big aha is. I have visited a solar power plant, two substations, talked to engineers and technicians, tracked the storm and power outages while it was ongoing, and observed customer interactions at one of Halifax Electric’s Office. I get excited thinking about the applications and the appreciation that my students should have when it comes to map reading, architectural designing of power plants, distribution and even the maintenance of the power station and the grid.

At the Lake Gaston Chamber of Commerce, my aha moment was when I was using the Geographic Information System (GIS) at one of the websites we were getting the information from. My students can use real-time data, generate frequency tables and plot their findings based on what they have gathered. This time they will really know the relevance of these mathematical concepts in the real-world.

Done! Finally! At least for now…

I really was struggling on what I wanted to bring to my classroom and add up to what I have been doing already. There are many different topics that would fit in. It is just a matter of choosing which one to do best. I thought I’m going to focus on GIS since that is what I have been using last week. However, since I started with Halifax Electric I have started on thinking more about Energy Sources, Transformation and Distribution. I have finally decided to write about it.

It looks rough right now since my head is full of many different things that I want to see as  a final result. On the other hand, it is a starting point. I can always edit it and make it better in the next few days as I complete my internship. I still have to complete my data collection and I am thinking of making another lesson incorporating that too. It might not be the one I would submit for Kenan but I know I will eventually use one in my classroom.

Thanks a lot for the many different knowledge I have gained for the past few days. Now I have a lot to incorporate in my lessons and a lot to bring back to the kids. 🙂

I wasn’t really excited when I learned what I have to do for my internship. On the very first day I have to draft two surveys for visitors and homeowners at the Lake Gaston area.  After that I have to update all their records of homeowners’ association that has been done 5 yrs ago by calling all the numbers and making sure they still work. As expected many of them were disconnected, assigned to different people or just not working anymore. Some of the homeowners were really helpful while many also were outright rude. I was really getting discouraged and was asking myself why oh why I signed-up for this. It was really difficult to find any connection to my classroom what I was doing since my mind and heart was not really into it.

Since we were not getting anywherewith phone calls, my mentor decided to go for the records – the tax records. On the website we discovered GIS – Geographic Information Services, and it was really amazing for me.  I can find information that I needed at the tip of my fingertips since they give public access on the website and I don’t have to make phone calls anymore! On the other hand, I have to make sense of the data, do away with many different information I don’t need, arrange them as needed, make the tally AND THEN interpret. All I can say is that the program really is amazing and at the same time I found out that sitting down for five days, working on data is NOT really as exciting as being in the classroom. 🙁

I’m thinking of writing my lesson with GIS as one of my focuses where my students will gather data from real offices in our area and then interpret the results.  However, I am not even so sure on whether that will be my final lesson since I have not been to my other mentor’s office yet. I will eventually make the connections for these two when I start next week on the other office and then I will go from there.

The use of technology in the classroom is one of the requirements when we make our lesson plans and also on our state evaluation. With this as one of the strands of NC Teachers’ evaluation one can believe or assume that every single classroom in every school is equipped with technology. However, this is not the case, especially in my school.

We do not have enough computers in the school. We only have five computer labs that has more or less 22 computers working, sometimes 20, that caters to all 500+ students.  We have to reserve the lab before any other teacher can to make sure that we can use the lab on the day that we need it. We have two roving carts for mobile computers that may or may not work that is why I do not use them anymore. Luckily we were granted thirty (30) chrome books from Title 1 money and we have to share this to the whole school too. We were also given 20 iPod touch by NC State in support of the STEM Program. All of these gadgets and equipments have helped us use technology in the classroom, which may or may not have a projector.

Inasmuch as we would like to use technology in the classroom every single day, we cannot due to these limitations. We hope that we can get more support in the coming years, especially for some scientific equipments that we can use in our experiments.

Thus the question “To Tech or Not To Tech?”

Well, I have to get in line.