Internship reflections: TF VII. C

Participate in professional development opportunities related to management of school facilities, technology resources, and purchases.

Train teachers on global education opportunities.

With the help of Edna Phythian, our district Global Educator on Special Assignment, I am able to work efficiently with my teachers on global opportunities. Specifically in September 2010, I worked with the Kindergarten team on working with China. We created videos of specific seasonal customs.  Our kindergartners created simple classroom graphs of their favorite foods for lunch. We had items such as pizza, spaghetti, and chicken nuggets. We then decided that with kindergartners we need to take an opportunity to share our information first with local, in district schools. This was to help the students understand that we are first sharing locally then sharing globally. We did not wan to overwhelm each class so we did the sharing with groups of three classes. One kindergarten class from our school met with a class at Armstrong and another class at Hyer.  After students practiced their presentation we met via WebEx and shared. Then I would go to another class, set up the Webex conference, and we would share with another  group. Finally, after all the local sharing occurred, I recorded, using a camcorder, one group from each class presenting their graphs. I then posted the videos to my school blog so we could share with our partners from China. We could not meet with them live since their time zone is so different than ours. Posting videos was a logical way to work through the time differences. During these lessons, I worked with the teachers on how to use the WebEx system, recording using the video camera, and uploading videos to a blog. These lessons helped the teachers to continue the project without having to rely on someone else.