Dannielle Neral

ET.691 Loyola University

February 8, 2021

My Internship Proposal

Throughout the last year of school, teachers across the world have had to adapt their

teaching styles due to the COVID-19 pandemic and elimination of in-person learning. While

some teachers may find it easy to learn new technologies and discover how to use popular

learning websites, others may still be struggling to adapt to this new wave of virtual learning. I

have found that even teachers at my own school and across my county use social media

platforms, such as WhatsAPP and Facebook to communicate about their struggles, successes,

and their own new ideas about websites and technology sources they come across. The more

collaboration and sharing of ideas that we can provide each other with as teachers, the better we

can teach!

As I enter my final semester of the Educational Technology program at Loyola

University, Maryland, I would like to propose my internship idea that will help members of the

faculty at my school to collaborate and share their favorite and most successful resources they

have found online throughout our last year of virtual learning. I want to make sure that as I end

this school year, and as we begin to transition to hybrid learning, myself and my colleagues, are

the most equipped we can be with one “house” of resources on our Schoology learning platform.

This will be a place we can go to get new ideas for lessons, learn how to navigate certain sites,

ask and answer questions for our teammates, and propose new websites we can explore together.
 In the next couple weeks, I will be sorting out the fine details of my intentions and steps

of this project, with the goal to send a survey out to all staff before the start of March. March 1st

is the first day any students in my county will be returning, so this will give staff time to reflect

and respond to the survey I put out. I am going to survey the whole staff of my school, with the

hope that at least ten teachers of a variety of grades will agree to take part in my project. My

school services students in grades pre-kindergarten through fifth grade so I am hoping to have at

least two/three teachers from the primary and two/three from the intermediate, with the

possibility of a few other staff joining from administration or special areas. The survey will ask

several questions about the types of websites they are currently using with their class, the level of

student engagement they get with using them, the level of ease or difficulty each site takes to

learn, and their willingness to try new sites as well as propose ideas for trying out new websites

over the course of a month and a half.

During the course of the internship, it will be my goal to evaluate the surveys from staff

and essentially teach myself to use at least one new site or program per week. This can either be

a site that a staff member is currently using or one that a staff member wrote that they would like

to learn or see implemented. I will then make a post on our school’s learning platform,

Schoology, in a resources folder. The post will include links, tutorials, pictures, descriptions,

lesson ideas, and tips for how to use and navigate each new “piece” of technology that I learn.

On a weekly basis, I will remind the staff members who said they were interested via an email

that I have posted a new write-up on our resources page. They will be encouraged to try out the

site or tool for themselves in their own classes. There will be space available for them to make

“discussion posts” or comment back and forth to each other about their likes, dislikes, questions,

etc.
 The benefit of being a school system which is currently completely virtual and only

switching to hybrid will be that my project will be able to continue throughout the rest of the

school year no matter what happens with the pandemic caused changes. Also, knowing that these

are adult learners who have already busy schedules of their own, they will be able to login to the

Schoology site on their own time and engage in the discussions and posts as little or as often as

they need to. By the end of the project (about a month and a half from March 1st), I will send a

concluding survey out to staff who chose to participate and stay engaged in my weekly posted

resources. This survey will ask staff how they were able to change lessons, engage students, and

professionally develop in the learning that I encouraged. They will have the ability to share

lesson materials and work samples from students at this time. The objective for me is to see that

the staff who were involved were able to see an improvement in students' engagement during

their lessons, as well as a boost in teacher morale in lesson planning. With surveying the staff

ahead of time for this project, I hope that the ones who commit to participating will uphold their

agreement to do so, however, I know that many people are busy this time of year preparing to go

back into the classroom to teach. For those who are unable to respond via Schoology, I will be

sure to reach out to them in person or via email to communicate what I can with them about the

resources I am finding. In order to note change, I would love for each participant to at least have

one way their lessons were able to improve from the resources I provided throughout the project.

While creating the resources that I am going to use on my Schoology platform, I will be

sure to take into consideration what I have learned in the Educational Technology program at

Loyola thus far, including Ely’s Eight Conditions of Change, as well as some SAMR and

TPACK design principles when I make my materials. Due to the need for more websites and

online resources to be available for our teachers, as well as the lack of student engagement using
the Google Meet platform, there is definitely a need for this project. With Ely’s other conditions

such as my own personal time, the knowledge of sites and tools we have all used and found

beneficial, the school staff at my school being able to participate and commit to being involved,

my principal and leadership at the school being involved, I should be able to meet all of the

conditions. With my knowledge of SAMR and TPACK models, I will make sure that the tutorials

and modules I am posting are able to meet the needs of the staff at my school. I will provide

relevant pedagogy, make sure they are able to modify and redesign the tools to meet their needs,

and even model how sites and tools can be used in their lessons.

To comply with the objectives of my program’s criteria, this project will meet several of

the Educational Technology program’s key objectives, but there are five that it will exemplify.

The first being, 11.1 of Multimedia Production (“Candidates will be able to create multimedia

products that facilitate K-12 instructional and professional learning goals, and implement an

instructional design model to facilitate student multimedia production”). The actual resources

folder posts I will be making will be additional examples of how to use our Schoology learning

platform. This is a new piece of technology itself that many teachers had to learn and relearn

how to use at the start of virtual learning. The blog-type posts that I will be making will include

different examples and features of the site that teachers can also use as examples for lesson

materials. The second objective, 13.2 (“Candidates will understand technological tools for

collaboration with colleagues and demonstrate the disposition to use technological tools for

collaboration in appropriate ways”) will be evident in the way that I am able to communicate my

ideas and tutorials with the staff in my building who participate, as well as those who

communicate back and forth with others on the platform I use. The third objective 15.1,

(“Candidates will be able to apply models of professional learning to begin the process of real
change in a school”) will be evident in the way that the participating staff are able to apply what

they have learned in my project to their own teaching. They will be able to show samples from

lessons and communicate on our discussion posts about how their lessons went. The fourth

objective, 16.1 (“Candidates will be able to actively engage in professional learning networks

(PLN) to collaborate and share ideas and resources with colleagues”) will be shown in the ways

staff at my school are able to share with other colleagues and members of the school and county

community after learning what they see in my project. Myself and them will also be able to use

platforms, like our county teacher Facebook group to find ideas for new websites and tools to use

as well. Finally, objective 17.1 (“Candidates will be able to locate a variety of technology

resources, evaluate them for classroom use, and assist colleagues with this process”) will be

easily shown throughout the whole duration of the project in that the main objective is to create

an accessible resource library that teachers at my school can continually use and collaborate

within. Over the course of my internship, it will be made clear that these objectives will be met

and that myself, as well as my coworkers who participate, learn as much as we can about new

pieces of technology and websites that will better our teaching and lessons for our students!