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Granite School District > Superintendent's Office > Sup’s Vlog > technology

technology

Question – Cell phone use of district drivers

Question – What is the policy of cell phone use while driving a vehicle during working hours. If we don’t have one, Why not?

Response – In addition to a state law that prevents this, we also have district policy and practice which indicates (from the bus driver manual), “A driver shall not use a cell phone, talking or texting, while operating a school bus, unless the bus has been pulled over safely and stopped. Drivers may never use a blue tooth or any form of earphones. Improper use of cell phones will result in at least a written warning, whether talking or texting.” We also comply with a state office of education memo which indicates the same restrictions as our own policy.

If you see district employees violating this policy, we would appreciate notification directly to the Transportation Department at (385) 646-4280.

Thanks to our Transportation Department for their assistance in responding to this question.

Thank You

Supt. Bates:

Thank you for stepping back and trying to address the original “cart before the horse” question. I appreciate that you took a new look at the original question and tried to restate an answer.
I also was extremely frustrated the other day when the wireless was not functioning (yet again!) because I really am trying to integrate technology into my instruction. But it is really difficult to plan a lesson around technology only to have the technology be unavailable or non-functional. You have a lot more support from teachers on the technology push than you realize, but the infrastructure for technology in our district often fosters complete frustration.

Mary Lamb
6th Grade Teacher
Hillsdale Elementary

Superintendent Snapshot – Something You Have Never Seen a Superintendent Do

All,

Here is the latest snapshot video as a follow up to last weeks snapshot regarding putting the cart before the horse. Hope your week is going well.

Superintendent Bates

Superintendent Snapshot – Cart Before the Horse on Technology?

Here is the latest snapshot regarding the technology initiative the Superintendent is pushing. Please continue submitting your questions!

Question – Videos in the School

Question: I have recently discovered many great ways a digital camcorder can be used to enhance curriculum and instruction in the classroom. I have also realized the sundry privacy issues that accompany its use. Allowing parents and others to view those videos can be a very powerful tool. Other schools have posted videos on the district’s YouTube page, so I wonder what process(es) they had to go through to be able to do that without major (or minor) repercussions stemming from privacy issues. I know the district’s privacy/media policy recently changed, so what do I have to do now to be able to post videos to YouTube, whether on the district’s page or not?

Response: I have attached a link to a page that includes both the student privacy guidelines that govern this issue in addition to the media policy.

https://www.graniteschools.org/depart/superintendent/communications/Pages/default.aspx

Filming classroom activities for additional educational purposes is allowed under the following stipulations (pulled from the policies mentioned above):

Students who are filmed have NOT opted out under our “Student Privacy Rights” policy (a school secretary can run a query in Discovery to see who has opted out). We do not identify any specific students in videos with any additional text in the description or cutline. We do not interview students without express parental permission. Personal contact information about students must never be published.

We already have some videos from classrooms on our page. You can submit videos for youtube to Randy Ripplinger. You can email him at this address.

Thanks to the Communications Department for their assistance in responding to this question.

Question – Teacher Websites

Question:

I noticed the Granite teacher portal offers a tutorial for setting up a teacher website through Granite school district. Rather than fussing with all new templates, and sitting through tutorials, why don’t we stick with the uen.org website format? I use my uen website as the repository for all the links I refer to during teaching (a much better option than saving links to your favorites tab – especially because there’s no physical way to back up your favorites browser folder).

With well over 400 links up on my uen website I am concerned someone, namely administration (don’t take it personally), will get a wild hare and decide we have a new “latest and greatest” Granite school website builder and will be “persuading” all of us to jump ship from the uen.org website builder. I’m not in the mood to migrate after spending the past three plus years setting up a fantastic teacher tool.

What are your thoughts? And here is a link to my website: http://my.uen.org/myuen/212513/Home Click on math fun or one of my science links – there are 40-50 links for those sections alone.

Response:

Great question and great job! It is exciting to see you have already jumped the biggest hurdle by actually having a web presence as a teacher.

Currently, the district has asked that all elementary teachers have a web presence. This can be on any platform – Dreamweaver, Weebly, Wikispaces, myUEN to name a few.

It sounds like your concern is that a particular website creation tool would be adopted and promoted by the district causing you to have to migrate your content to the new platform. I have to be honest and say that is a possibility. As technology changes and better tools become available we all need to consider them. With that said, I think your point has to be considered when making decisions regarding technology tools. The positives would really need to outweigh the negatives. We certainly don’t want to have teachers work harder for no reason. Believe it or not, we’re trying to make things easier! It is important that if a decision is made to use a new tool, you have support and assistance in taking what you currently have and migrating it. For some it will be giving support and assistance in making the paradigm change you have already made in using a fantastic teacher/student/parent tool.

In addition to the great communication potential between teacher, students and parents, we are really hoping to facilitate collaboration between teachers.  Let’s say we are able to roll out electronic support for teachers – just for the sake of this answer, let’s say we develop a menu of tier 1, 2, and 3 electronic lessons and resources corresponding to the math (or science or any/every other subject) objectives.  Teachers could share them, comment on them (like/dislike), improve upon them and so on.  This is not a technological stretch of the imagination.  It would however, be much more user friendly if the format was standardized.  We’re literally working on this right now!

Regardless, your UEN website is cool. Every teacher should check this out as you have added polls, links to the school webpage, and links to curriculum in addition to all of the digital content you refer to when teaching. Again, great job!