Technology Committee Meets

Today was the first meeting of my school's Technology Committee (and my first technology committee ever!), so I was a little excited and a little nervous all at the same time. The meeting went so well! I am very impressed with our members and am very excited about all of the ideas we came up with. I think it's going to be a fantastic year!

I started out with making sure we had representatives for each grade level and setting the goals up for the group. We decided that we will meet once a month face-to-face and then set up a page on our website where members could check in and post messages online, checking that once a week. So guess what's on my to do list tomorrow? Making sure that page happens! Note to self: talk with our wonderful librarian and webmaster on that!

My goals for the committee this year are this: 1) Make sure we talk about constructive technology uses, 2) keep the members up to date with technology and software, 3) Talk about mentoring programs, where more technology savvy teachers can work with not so technology savvy teachers (spreading around our knowledge and expertise), 4) work on writing grants, and 5) coming up with building technology initiatives. My 9 member team came up with amazing ideas as I talked about these. They added in modeling units and sharing professional development responsibilities, where they can present some of the technology to their teams and grade levels. I couldn't be happier with this idea. They also suggested that we come up with a list of expert areas and each member can be the "expert" for that area. For example, one of the seventh grade teachers has done a lot with the quizdom remotes, so they would be able to help show other teachers and answer questions.

We also decided as a group that our goal for this year will be to make sure that every teacher in our building uses technology at least once. That's every teacher using technology at least once this school year. With all of the new technology in my building this should not be a hard task to accomplish, but it might take some effort on everyone's part.

I think the part I am most excited about is that everyone wants to meet virtually so often! We may not meet together online at precisely the same time, but we can still be passing around ideas and collaborating to make a good technology environment and help everyone. We are definitely off to a good start!