ShelleyMalinski

=This is how TesTrakker makes Millbrook teachers feel... =

**right now...**

Please go to TesTrakker for Teachers to see my timesheets, other requirements for this Internship, and the items that I am creating for this Internship.

__**November 22** __  **Another slow moving couple of weeks, and unfortunately, many life issues came into play these past two weeks. I was able to accomplish getting the rest of my tutorials recorded and posted on my internship website. After recording the first couple, I realized that writing a script would be pretty helpful, so after I created all of the PowerPoints, I printed them out and wrote what I wanted to say. This worked well because I also found some mistakes that I made and needed to correct! When I began to record the tutorials, I ran into issues with the technology. I found myself starting and stopping, starting and stopping, but I finally got them recorded!**  **I have had some questions from some of the teachers at the school and have sat down with them to walk them through the steps that they needed to go through to be successful at using TesTrakker. One teacher asked for my help and I realized that she wasn't saving her plans when she was creating them, so all the work she had been doing was pointless!!! Luckily, she has been attaching her plans and still had most of them, so I sat down and created new plans for each one so that they would be in the system. I think she'll be good to go now!**  **I hope I have found the last 10 articles that I need for my annotated bibliography - I even found some extras just in case! I have started reading a couple of articles, but ran into a standstill this past week when some family issues came up, so I hope to get these done over the Thanksgiving break.**  **I see the light at the end of the tunnel and am hoping I can reach it shortly!!!** 

 __**November 8** __

**These past couple of weeks have been slow going, however I have gotten a lot done. I'm doing better with my time and I feel better about what I have done as our Internships begin to wind down.**

<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">**Not too much has happened these past two weeks, but I have been working steadily on my tutorials. I finished all of my Quick Reference Guides (unless someone comes to me with a question that I can answer using a QRG). I have finished creating my two main tutorials in PowerPoint but now need to record them. This will be accomplished shortly - hopefully, this week!**

<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">**I have began the second part of my Annotated Bibliography and I think that I have found all the articles I need to complete my annotations.**

<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">**One problem I worked on solving for one of our teachers has taken some time. When she would go to her preferences, she never had a list of students. Even after clicking "Update Student List" her list was not pulled in from PowerSchool like it was supposed to be. Without students, this teacher can't create lesson plans. As this was not a problem I could solve, I emailed our technology department. It took almost two weeks for them to get in touch with me, but they finally emailed me this past week and said the problem was solved. I didn't have time to check at that time, but I passed on the message to the teacher and to our Principal as I am keeping her updated on situations like this. The teacher emailed me Friday and it still wasn't working for her! I figured out that the technology department has this teacher with two different user names. I emailed her back to let her know and I also emailed my Principal because I'm not sure how to handle that situation! We'll see what happens as that situation progresses.**

<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">**These past two weeks also allowed me to catch up on my group members' projects and really assess what they have been doing. I was also able to give them more feedback than I have in the past.**

<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">**I am looking forward to the next couple of weeks as I finish up my tutorials and read my final articles for the rest of the Annotated Bibliography.**

__<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">**October 25** __

<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">**These past couple of weeks have been quite successful...nervewracking, but successful! My principal emailed me about doing a staff development with teachers one Wednesday afternoon in the computer lab. I have always had a hard time speaking to adults, which is why I teach seven and eight-year olds! The staff development ended up being very successful! I received a lot of positive feedback on the training and am looking forward to doing more.**

<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">**There were a few glitches in using TesTrakker. The main glitch being the computer lab - the computers are so old and TesTrakker does not seem to adjust to the settings on the computers. Luckily, I figured this out before the teachers had arrived and we began our session by changing some settings on the computer so that TesTrakker could be used effectively.**

<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">**Another issue our 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade teachers are frustrated with is that the district expects them to use only the Common Core standards for English Language Arts (ELA). The probelm with this is that the students will be taking the PASS test which focuses on the South Carolina State Standards, so we are struggling with the solution on that issue.**

<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">**Finally, we still have faculty members who write out their lesson plans. I was teaching our faculty how to attach their lesson plans in TesTrakker so that they would not have to cut and paste everything, which is extremely time-consuming. An idea was brought up to scan their lesson plans as PDFs and then attach them, but I'm not sure how well that was accepted. Other teachers are sharing their Word templates for these teachers to use - I did the same with my 2nd grade team and I know that one teacher I sent it to is using that template. This same teacher was quite thankful for the staff development and is so excited that she knows how to attach them in TesTrakker.**

<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">**We also checked to make sure our standards were checked in our Preferences menu. This took some time and there were some issues, but most of the issues were figured out.** **Our principal's hope is that our entire school will be using TesTrakker weekly by November 1 - I'm curious to see if everyone will be using it.**

<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">**Throughout these past two weeks some other technology-related things have come up. For example, our faculty was introduced to School Fusion where we can keep up our own classroom websites. It seems very user-friendly and I am quite excited about it and have been setting up my own classroom page and updating it weekly. I have helped several teachers with some PowerSchool issues and with some hardware issues (malfunctioning printers). My faculty seems to be embracing me as someone they can come to with technology-related problems, which makes me feel useful. This used to be another teacher's job, but she retired last year and I have become her replacement. I love being helpful in this capacity, so I am quite excited about having this role within our school. I look forward to continuing to help the faculty members at Millbrook and I hope that many will be successful with TesTrakker as it continues to be implemented.**

<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">**I have uploaded one tutorial and am currently working on another. These are taking some time because of having to record myself. If I mess up, I have to start over - it's the OCD in me! I have also changed my website around and have created different pages for the different components of this internship. Hopefully it will be more user-friendly.**

__<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">**October 11** __

<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',Helvetica,sans-serif;">** Midterm Presentation **
 * <span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">Annotated Bibliography **

<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">__**September 27**__

<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">**Overwhelmed is the first word that comes to mind after these past two weeks. The public education system in South Carolina loves to give teachers new things to use without training them on it. TesTrakker is something that Aiken County has implemented, but teachers have just found out recently of something else coming into play for this year that we have not been trained on - this coming from the South Carolina Department of Education. I guess I can include frustration in with overwhelmed.**

<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">**As far as TesTrakker goes, I'm moving right along. I have decided to focus on the Quick Reference Guides (QRGs) first and then work on the tutorial videos. My QRGs will give me a step-by-step guide for putting my videos together. I have been taking screen shots within TesTrakker to create my videos. I am going to use PowerPoint to create my tutorials and then record my voice over the PowerPoint using Camtasia. I was originally going to use Jing and record myself within TesTrakker, but seeing Dr. Smyth's note about making videos professional made me rethink that. I have also found that when I record myself using a program, I typically have to record myself several times because either I mess up or the technology acts up. Using PowerPoint and Camtasia seems the more sensible way to go and it will look more professional.**

<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">**My principal asked me to speak to the faculty briefly about what I will be doing with TesTrakker. Some of the problems that teachers are having are with the software which is something I have no control over and has to be brought up to the technology department. Hopefully, most of those problems have been pinpointed and fixed. I had planned to do a staff development at the end of this semester, but it looks like I may be doing several shorter staff developments and I may be doing some one-on-one sessions with teachers who are extremely uncomfortable with TesTrakker.**

<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">**I have started looking for articles for my annotated bibliography and had to think of a topic more broad than TesTrakker. Since it is a newer program, not much has been researched on it. I emailed Dr. Smyth for some guidance, so I'm going to focus on the broad subject of computerized programs that are similar to TesTrakker. I will continue my search and see how that topic works out for me.**

<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">**I haven't been getting in enough hours, so I will be cracking down on myself and working in (at least) two hours a day - I'm just hoping I can stay sane! My time management skills haven't been on target :-/. I hope to improve those skills during the next two weeks. May time be my friend!!!**

<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">__**September 13**__

<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">**First thing is first, there aren't many people at my school happy about TesTrakker and many of us have ended up like the guy in the picture above...literally! I decided to do my Internship not only to figure out TesTrakker but to help my fellow teachers understand it. I am one of those people who loves technology and isn't afraid of it, but many of my fellow teachers are terrified of it!**

<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">**I mentioned this Internship to my principal and she was extremely excited about me taking on TesTrakker. Our school, Millbrook Elementary, was the first school trained on this program and we were trained in April. We haven't been using the program because it wasn't completely ready for us to use, so you can imagine how much information we retained! The District expects us to use this program and, yet, the training was about forty minutes long and it was 5 months ago. For teachers who are terrified of technology, forty minutes using it 5 months ago is not going to cut it!**

<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">**My principal thought that my mentor should be our Media Specialist because she is also our technology person at the school. I realized a few days ago that our Media Specialist doesn't even have access to TesTrakker. She's the one who is being trained to use it but is not even able to use it herself. I am hoping that I can help her when she is asked questions or when another training session comes along - it may be helpful for me to go too!**

<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">**I emailed our District's Technology Department, but I did not receive a response from them. That was very disappointing.**

<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS',Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">**I have also emailed all the teachers at my school and the majority of the responses were positive - they are happy I am taking this task on. Of course, I also received a lot of questions when I sent this email out! I answered the ones I could and got quickly to work on figuring out the answers to the ones I had no clue about. I hope my meddling in TesTrakker will prove beneficial. As I move on to the next stage, I look forward to sharing with the teachers the documents and tutorials I create that could possibly help them understand and be able to use TesTrakker.**