Mount Baker School District Technology Committee

Mount Baker School District Technology Committee

October 21, 2004, 4:00 pm, District Office

Members Present:  Gary Wall, Max Duncan, Jon Anderson, Sher Ross, Doug Sutton

Guest:  Mark Challender

1)         Technology Staff Development

Since our last meeting, Dr. Wall consulted with people at ESD 189 to get an outside perspective on our work.  He shared our district technology plan and our school improvement plans and asked for some direction.

One result of this was to recognize that our Technology Coach program has promise, but we haven’t given it much direction yet.  Maybe we need to invest much of our staff development energies into this program – increase the skills of our coaches and our tech committee in order to better lead the district.

One place to start is to have a group of us – Tech Committee members and Technology Coaches – participate in a needs analysis survey.  PILOT (developed by Washington ESDs) is an online survey intended to identify strengths and weaknesses in educational technology and help us chart a course for improvement.

We (Tech Committee members and Technology Coaches) will do the survey – it is located at:  http://www.edtech.wednet.edu/pilot/index.cfm.  It is estimated that the complete survey will take 45 minutes – we’ve dropped a couple of the categories of the survey for our purposes – don’t do everything.

1)     Click “Create New Account”

2)     “ESD 189”

3)     “Mount Baker School District”

4)     Fill in the registration information – but, when selecting your “school,” please select “Timber Ridge Alternative” (this will give us our own Group Profile to examine the group results)

5)     Don’t check the NoLimits group

Once you are logged in, enter the survey.  Do the following sections:

Please complete this survey prior to the next Tech Committee meeting.

If we ask a large group of our teachers to do this survey, we may narrow the focus of what we ask them to do, depending on our goals and perceived needs – maybe only one or two sections

2)         A Technology Solution

Mark Challender presented a tool that may be of value to schools – a unit that allows a teacher in a computer lab to send a signal from any computer in the room to the projector – it’s relatively inexpensive ($319 – not including the projector), and may be of value to a teacher or a school.  Thanks to Mark for keeping us aware of the possibilities.

Next Meeting:  November 22????? – 4:00 pm – District Office

Respectfully Submitted,

Doug Sutton