Communication 08
This area of my eportfolio is a compilation product of important concepts I learned in the Strategic Planning for Technology Integration (link) graduate course (ETEC 593) I took in the Spring of 2022 at Texas A&M University - Commerce. This eportfolio, I created to demonstrate the process of actions necessary to create a strategic plan for integrating technology in traditional teaching and learning classrooms.
Reflection
The technology integration strategic planning project t created during my graduate program learning experiences was a meaningful and rewarding experience. I work in higher education, and occasionally through the years, due to bond elections, our district has the funds to make improvements and sometimes even adds new buildings to some of our campuses. One such passing of a bond election, one of our college campuses was fortunate to have a new science building built for the sciences, including biology and chemistry. The architect who worked at the district oversaw this project but needed to consult the end users, the science faculty, and the science laboratory coordinators. This resulted in the chemistry laboratories being set up on the second of three floors, with the biology laboratories on the third floor. This now presents a safety issue because the exhaust hoods for the dangerous chemicals do not optimally and properly dissipate and filter. If the architect had consulted the end-user of this important academic project, then he would have known that it was vital for the chemistry laboratories to always be placed on the top floor because of the ventilation and filtration systems, and this is of utmost importance. Olsen’s pitfalls in this situation were accountability, communication, decision-making, ownership, and overwhelming. The architect learned a valuable and expensive lesson to consult the end-users of the areas around the district that this person was overseeing because it resulted in him being accountable for that adverse safety issue that was too late to resolve once the educators and science lab coordinators discovered it. If this person had included the educators, scientists, and safety lab coordinators during the initial project planning, then the decision-making for the project would have gone better. The architect had to ultimately take ownership of the colossal mistake made under this person’s watch that still adversely affects people today.