ET 691 Internship Journal

David M. Maimone

August 29, 2018

Met with Brenda about the internship project. Laid out the timeline and the major parts
including both working with our staff to develop online PD as well as creating short, tutorial
videos for professional development topics. Brenda seemed very excited about the video aspect.
She asked about and we discussed possible topics. I haven’t decided on the topics yet but will do
so in the next month or so. Brenda gave me the verbal “go ahead” to begin working with OSE
staff.

9/7/2018
Had my first meeting with the AA (additional adult) committee. The focus of this committee
was how OSE could train our additional adults. While I’m not on the committee, I was invited
because part of the training will involve video. Brenda thought it would be a good idea if I
listened to what the committee wanted to do and see if I could support them with using
technology to create a video tutorial for them. Dan, Jackie, and Robin are going to shoot video
of scenarios that they would like to use in training. My thoughts were that I could teach them
how to video edit as well as caption their video. After listening to the discussion, none of the
members of this committee had that knowledge. Once I get the video footage I can work with
them to edit, caption, and produce their video.

9/21/2018
Met with Jason from the ESY committee. Jason is a specialist in our office and is working on
revising a PowerPoint that was used during a face to face professional development last June for
teachers working in Extended School Year (ESY). Rebecca, the OSE director, wants to have
that presentation be able to be delivered online. I worked with Jason on three things. First, I
taught him how to use Screen-Cast-O-Matic to record the presentation in a video format. The
second thing we worked on was the audio. This was recorded during the actual screencast but
we worked on scriptwriting and timings. I was able to walk Jason through the process of
organizing the text. Jason’s tech skills are pretty good so he was able to pick up this new tool
fairly quickly. We were able to go over the basics of the software as well as organize and write
the scipt.

10/1/18
Met with Brenda today to check in about the internship. This was a brief meeting. I updated her
that I have not yet received the video from Jackie for the AA tutorial. Brenda said that she
would follow up on that. Brenda was very happy with the progress on the ESY PD that Jason
and I are working on recording and captioning. Brenda has been very helpful and offered any
support that I needed. At this point I feel that I’m on track with working with individuals in my
office but I haven’t started the tutorial videos that I wanted to create. That will be my goal for
the next few weeks.

10/5/2018
Worked with Jason again today on captioning the video. This seemed a bit trickier as we used
the captioning feature in Screencast-o-matic. This software has a voice to text feature so it was
able to caption the video from the audio that Jason recorded last time we met. However, the
voice to text was not perfect and we needed to go into each slide and edit the text as well as the
timings. This worked well but was very time consuming. We worked for about two and a half
hours and only got through about a third of the video. However, I feel pretty confident that now
that Jason knows the process that he will be able to finish without me with him. I will plan on
checking in with him when he is done to review the finished product.

10/10/2018
Have another request for support on a PD for a presentation that will be given to IEP chairs.
This was from one of our supervisors, Linda P. The presentation is on a new document that IEP
chairs will need to complete when requesting a different placement for a student. Similarly to
the ESY PowerPoint that I’m working on with Jason, this presentation has been developed with
PowerPoint with the intention of being delivered face to face. What Linda has requested is two-
fold. First, with the face to face presentation, she wants a way to assess the participant’s learning
and to be able to look at performance data. Secondly, she wants a way to record the presentation
so that IEP chairs who could not attend the face to face session could still get the information and
so that we can post it online as a reference to any of the chairs who may need it. When Linda
first came to me about this, she presented it to me as a task for me to do. That really wasn’t the
point of the internship. I know that I can do those things, but the goal for this is to teach and
empower others in the office to gain the technology skills and comfort level to use tech in their
professional development. So I offered to work with and teach Linda how do to both of those
things. She agreed and we set a time on 10/18 to begin.

10/18/2018
Met with Linda today. The PowerPoint was already completed and approved by OSE leadership.
Now it was time to work on recording it and developing and online assessment tool. Since the
face to face presentations were coming up in about a week, we decided to work on the
assessment piece first. Unlike Jason, Linda is not as tech savvy, nor does she have the comfort
level with technology. So, I thought I would choose a tool that most teachers are familiar with
and that is relatively easy to use, Kahoot. I figured the benefit of using Kahoot would be that
when Linda is presenting and doing the assessment, she won’t need to spend a lot of time
teaching the participants how to use it since most of them are already familiar. Even if they
aren’t, it is do easy for participants to use that it would be perfect for Linda. So, we went into
Kahoot and I showed Linda how to enter in questions. This actually proved to be a little
problematic because Kahoot limits the amount of characters for each question, so Linda had to
revise some of her wording to fit within the character limit. Once we were able to get the
questions in, I showed her how to adjust the settings and we played a practice round. To do this
we needed two computers as she would run the Kahoot and I would act as a participant and
answer the questions. It worked smoothly. I showed Linda how to start the Kahoot and get the
numerical code that the participants would need to use.
The second part of this was to figure out how to get data from this. Now, this is something that I
never have done so this was new learning for me. The great thing about Kahoot is that it
automatically generates this data for download. Once I figured out how to download to Excel, it
was a pretty simple process that I was able to teach to Linda. One question we had is that if we
were to give the Kahoot over multiple sessions, would we be able to get accumulated data. This
is something I’ll need to work on.

10/23/2018
Today was the first day of our IEP chair meetings. We did six sessions today and I went to
support Linda with the Kahoot assessment and with the data collection. The presentation went
great and when it was time to do the first Kahoot, Linda pulled it up and was able to get the code
without my help. She also was able to get all of the participant onto the Kahoot. Believe me, for
Linda, this was a big accomplishment considering her comfort level with technology. The
Kahoot assessment took about 5 minutes and when the session was over, I did need to show
Linda how to download the data. One of the problems we ran into today was the fact that with
each of the six sessions, we needed to generate a new game of Kahoot. This meant that when we
downloaded the data, we had to do it separately for each session. While this is not ideal, it is
manageable. We will just need to take the data from all six sessions and compile it by hand. At
this point, I haven’t been able to come up with a technology solution to this. But overall, I’m
super proud of Linda and her ability to pull this off. There is no way that three months ago she
would have felt comfortable enough to lead an online assessment for a PD.

10/26/2018
Met with Brenda again to review progress with the internship. Just like the first time we met, she
was very happy with the progress I’ve been making with OSE staff. Up to this point it’s been
Linda and Jason. I still haven’t gotten the video footage for the AA PD. Brenda did follow up
and let me know that Jackie, Dan, and Robin are not finished recording yet. This may end up
being problematic, not for them, but for me with the internship. If I don’t have the video shortly,
I may run out of time to complete that prior to the 12/1 deadline. I still haven’t started planning
the video tutorials for the office. That is something that I wanted to do during the month of
October but I’ve been very busy working with OSE staff. That will be something I will work on
in the next week or two for sure.

10/26/2018

I’ve decided that it is a shame that out district doesn’t support Google-based apps because the
new Google Slides has a captioning feature that is very good. Within our network we cannot log
into our Google drives so it is not possible to use that. The reason I say this is that this afternoon
I worked again with Linda P. to take that IEP Chair Placement PD and work on recording and
captioning it. The funny thing is that Linda was good with doing all aspects of this except
having her voice on the recording. Because she was uncomfortable with that, she asked if Jason
could record. I told her that would be okay but that I wanted her to be there so she could learn
the process. She was fine with that. Just like with the previous recording I did with Jason, I
started out with Linda with helping her organize and write a script. Once she had that we
recorded the screencast. Jason read the script while it was recording. Linda watched the process
and even worked the screencast controls to start, stop, and save the recording. Once the
recording was complete, I worked with Linda to caption it. Like the previous PD we did, this
part was time consuming. We did not get far on that part today. I set another time to work with
Linda because unlike Jason who I felt comfortable completing the process on his own, I felt
Linda still needed support. We set a block of time for 11/2.

11/2/2018
Met with Linda again to work on the captioning part of the IEP Chair Placement PD. Like I
mentioned in a previous post, Linda’s skill and comfort level with technology is not that high so
she required a lot more attention to move her along. We continued captioning within Screencast-
o-matic and it went pretty well for the first two-thirds of the presentation. However, in the final
third, for some reason, the automatic captioning feature and the timings of the slides were not
synched up. There were times when the slide would move forward but the audio was still on the
previous slide. The strange thing about this was that up to this point the text and the audio were
virtually perfectly in synch and the only thing that Linda had to do was to make sure the speech
to text was correct. Now we had a problem and I wasn’t sure how to fix it. We looked online for
a solution but were unable to find one. What we ended up doing was deleting all the captioning
text that was on those last few slides and entering it in manually. This took a very long time
even for only about six minutes of presentation. I still don’t know what happened with the
recording to make it go out of synch but at least we were able to fix it.
At this point, I feel pretty good with the part of the internship that has me working with OSE
staff. I’ve worked with two staff members to completely produce an online version of their face
to face professional developments. I’m still waiting on the video from the other project but there
is not much I can do on that until I get the footage. The next step now is to work on the short
video tutorials for our office. I’m a little worried that I’m behind on that.