1. School name: Harry S. Truman Elementary School
2. Name of Principal: Tyler Howe
3. Names of teachers talked with whose classrooms you visited and grade level: Was sick, so did not go into the individual classrooms. I mostly talked with Principal Howe.
4. Ask the teachers/principal their perspective on current and future use of technology in the classroom: Principal Howe has already brought a large amount of technology into the school and he hopes to keep adding new technologies to keep his school on the same level of other schools in the state and in the country.
5. Does the school have its own website? Yes. If so who maintains the site what is the URL? The principle and Ted Thackeray (4th/5th teacher) maintain the website http://sites.google.com/site/trumanelementary/
6. Do teachers at the school have class blogs? If so who has access to them? A majority of the teachers have “class WebPages” which are basically blogs that everyone has access to. The teachers use it to keep track of their files and assignments and to keep the students and parents informed.
7. Is there a school technology supervisor? Name? They have media specials who maintain the technologies, the computer lab and also the library. They are Jeri Hofer and Kelly Rammel.
8. Do all the classrooms have computers in them? Explain what you find: A lot of the classrooms have at least one or two computers.
9. Is there a computer lab/s? If so how is it used and by whom? Yes there is a computer lab. The teachers have a signup sheet for days in which they need the student to use the computers.
10. What kinds of computers are in the school – PC’s, Laptops, Mac’s etc.? Overhead projection equipment etc.: PCs, overheads, smart boards, projectors
11. What software programs are regularly used by teachers?
12. Can/do teachers use the Internet in their instruction? Detail findings. Yes they can. A lot of them use the smart board to interact with varies websites.
13. How does a teacher get further training to use technology? The media specialists will train the teachers when they want to use of the technologies and show them how to use it.
14. See if you can get a sense of the % of students who might have a computer in their home: I believe about 75% of the students might have a computer in their home, just based on the amount of students using cell phones
15. Did you observe students using computer based technology? If so detail what you observed: Because I was sick, I did not go into the classrooms, but I was surprised to see a large amount of students using cell phones after school.
16. Other: The school has a twitter account, which I find to be convenient and pretty cool; I just don’t think it is exactly necessary. They also have school announcements that the children do on video. They record the pledge in different classrooms and play them on the school TVs on Monday mornings and announcements for what is taking place that week. It is called TNN (Truman News Network)
