June+Internship+Log+and+Reflection

June-http://ed-tech-internship.wikispaces.com/file/view/June+Log.docx/149233437/June+Log.docx


 * Week 1-** Working with Ms. Fawcett on the end of year inventory was not the most interesting or insightful activity I have done as part of my internship hours, but it was still important. The implications of not doing a good job on inventory are staggering when you consider how much equipment there is in the school and how much it costs. One thing that Ms. Fawcett told me that I thought was really important was that you have to stay on top of it every year, because once you lose track of items big or small, you will never get them back.


 * Week 3-** The SMS training proved to be a very daunting two day experience. The training gave me an idea of just how large of a database we were dealing with, it contained information on every student, teacher, and staff member in the district. When you consider that the district also has databases for human resources, gradebooks, and lesson plans of comprable size the realization of the amount of data being held on one network is completely astounding.

The SMS program was very interesting to learn, while it posed some challenges, it proved to be a very useful program and the consensus was that it is a much better program than it's predecessor SASI. The focus of the training was scheduling the students for next year, this was a complicated task to start, but once the basic steps were completed it began to get easier and progressed quickly. What made the process difficult was dealing with transfer students from another campus as the information given us was not clear.

What I took away from this aspect of the training was that communication is still key in the success of any endeavor technology related or not. Despite the new and advanced database that we were working with, we encountered severe issues due to the fact that we were not given clear data on whether or not the transfer students from the other campus were promoted or retained. While we did the best that we could to place the students in the right classes, there will undoubtedly be errors that will require more time and energy to correct this August when school starts.