Internship with BCSD
Berkeley County School District
For my EDET 650 course, I was to undergo an educational technology internship of my choosing. For my internship, I decided to intern with the Berkeley County School District (BCSD) Innovative Learning Coordinators (ILC). My internship was remote, and my supervisors were Priscilla Calcutt and Nicole LaPoint. My role as an intern was to mainly create video tutorials for Schoology implementation within BCSD, conduct a needs assessment and to create a job aid. The following resources are artifacts I completed throughout my internship:
My first creation was a Job Aid on how to encourage students to become self-starters. My mentor made it clear that BCSD colors were to be utilized throughout all projects and to keep information simple. The following image shows the Job Aid I created.
Next, I participated and conducted a Needs Assessment Report to figure out what teachers were interested in for professional development days. By completing this needs assessment for BCSD, I was able to provide areas of interest for trainings that BCSD could provide to teachers. The goal was to professional development trainings that teachers found productive, meaningful, and impactful. In the end, teachers are not interested in professional developments on Robotics, Dash and / or Ozobots. Meanwhile, teachers are interested in learning more about Canva and Book Creator.
The next two artifacts I created for my internship are similar in that they are Schoology tutorial videos. BCSD implemented Schoology into all schools and there was a lot of backlashes. With these videos, the goal was to show the Schoology has a lot of beneficial tools included within the LMS and to inform teachers about tools they may not be aware of. My mentors asked that I create a tutorial on the different assessment tools and on Immersive Reader.
Lastly, I created posters to inform teachers and students about the different assessment types within Schoology and about Immersive Reader within Schoology.
Overall, this internship was a great learning experience. As a teacher within BCSD, I too was not quite sure if I liked Schoology better than Google Classroom. By creating the tutorial videos, I too learned what they were and how to use them as I did not know they existed. By taking the time to experiment with the different assessment tools, I realized there were a lot of creative ways to assess students on content and started implementing these assessments into my content. I also was new to Immersive Reader. With having lots of multilingual learners in my classroom this is such a helpful tool! If I had not undergone this internship with BCSD I would still probably never know these assistive technology applications existed within Schoology.
This internship also allowed me to gather further knowledge and experience with conducting needs assessments. Being an ILC is an interest of mine, and it was interesting to see just how effective and important needs assessments are! This was really the first time I got to see a needs assessment in the “real world.”
All in all, this internship was a great learning moment and one I appreciate highly in the Learning Design and Technologies master’s program.