Reflecting Back...

Professional Growth and Leadership: My ongoing renewal of professional practice for adopting current technologies for student success.

In order to get this initiative started the committee has to think about what the next step to plan will be. This step will be giving time, commitment and teamwork to communicating this initiative to the Lake Forest School Board and the Delaware Early Childhood Center. If this initiative were passed, the next step would be to inform staff, new parents and community members of our plan. This comes with advertisement! Joanne, a member of the tech committee will be making posters, sending out emails and letters requesting feedback of the plan. Participation will be offered towards the end of August when school starts. This will then give the committee some time to prepare for the first tech session!


All of this seems simple and easy to do, but the process in getting here was not so much. The committee had to communicate by phone, email, Skype and tech blog in order to collaborate with one another. Unfortunately, due to the program being spread out amongst the state of Delaware, consistent communication was the most challenging for the committee. With that being said, the committee had agreed to collaborate as much as possible throughout the week but assign specific sections in the plan to one or two members. This really worked out with the team since everyone seemed to be on the same page from the first face-to-face meeting.


There were several areas in which the committee had to collaborate with one another to complete the section. These areas were to plan our technology initiatives as well as the solution plan, which was done in during the first face-to-face meeting. In the technology initiatives section, the committee had to agree on the vision/goal of the plan, the policies, decision-making process and how the committee was to communicate with one another throughout the seven week time period. The other areas which was spoken of during this meeting was the solution plan. In this section, the committee had to create a rationale, describe the technology that would be used, the outcomes and hope for the plan, policies, what the teacher current use in the program, analyzing the overall costs to the plan, and the basic design of the program itself for background information. All of the section spoken of are quite important to start with, these sections gave the base to the plan as well as provide all of the members of the committee with a place to start with their own section. Even though these two sections were crucial to the plan, the rest of the contributing sections have just as much of an impact in the presentation of the plan to Lake Forest School District and the Delaware Early Childhood Center.

A problem with the ECAP program would be the lack of technology and technology education in each one of the thirteen sites we serve in Kent and Sussex county. We decided to chose this initiative because of the lack of proper training for educators to use technology tools and how to embed them into their instruction each day. Even though funding might be as much as hoped, we have grants both long and short term that could help us in this issue. The overall maintenance and replacement could easily be provided by our housed district, Lake Forest.