My First Day As An Instructional Technologist

So yesterday I started a four day stint as an "instructional technologist" at my high school. We started a pilot program where Paul and I get release-time to work with staff members to infuse technology into their curriculum. As a substitute teacher took over my classes, I started meeting with teachers during their planning to find out how I could best help them. During my first day, I was able to meet with around a dozen teachers. We worked on things like creating Sharepoint sites for their classrooms, creating blogs, creating staff profile pages for the district's Website, Flip cameras, Skype, Twitter, and Google Docs. It was a pretty busy day. What I got out of it was that teachers are pretty open to using technology in the classroom, but most of them don't know where to start. Hopefully I can help them find the way. It is starting off with baby steps for some by creating a Web presence, creating document libraries for their students to store documents online, or posting information online. Others are already at that point and want to use YouTube movies to supplement their lessons or have present with Prezi instead of PowerPoint. I hope that I will be able to accomplish all of the goals I had in mind and still have time to followup with teachers while in the classroom. Overall, it has been very busy, but very rewarding. Day two here I come!