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Week 5 - Reflections on web conferences

I was very disappointed on the scheduled times for the web conferences for this course. I really feel they are important and from the previous two courses I was able to attended all of them because of the later times. For this course, most were at 5pm, which I’m still stuck in traffic after working all day. There were others at 6pm, which that doesn’t leave enough time to get the kids homework done and get them fed. So out of 5 weeks, I was only able to attend one web conference. That one was the Saturday before the Monday the class actually started. I am so glad I did because that is when I join the awesome group of Francia, Judy, Cindy, and Charleas. I think if I would not have attended, I would be like a fat kid in a dodge ball game. After seeing emails from students not in groups, my first thoughts were they must have missed the web conference.

I felt that I disagreed with the style and framework of this course. From reviewing the saved recordings of some of the web conferences that I could not attend, others were having the same issues. I had to view the web conference to make sense of all the old useless data stored for the course. I felt a lot of the documents could have been consolidated into one, especially for weeks 3, 4, 5. The standard for assignments up until this class, has been to insert my information into the box provided within the document to be submitted. From the 30 or so documents in this course, only 10 of them followed the standard. I had to use the recording to figure out that instead of updating documents, the Prof just added another entry.

This was the first course, where I felt the Prof strayed off topic a lot during the web conference. I’m just not sure, but after watching two more, I really began to notice this issue. This discouraged me from watching any of the other recorded web conferences. I hope that since this is my third course, that the other courses don’t flow and follow this pattern.

Week 2 - Podcast

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Week 1 Video - This Is My Story

Week 1 - Video Script

My name is Edwin Schuessler and this is my story.

I am currently an Application Specialist in the Technology Department for Spring ISD.  When I was little I never dreamed I’d be working with computers or in the technology field.  I always dreamed about being a truck driver.  I loved the big trucks. As a ten year old, I loved building and painting models cars, airplanes, and my favorite, eighteen wheelers. When we traveled on vacation, I can remember being on the road and every time we came up on an eighteen wheeler I would always count the tires to make sure there were eighteen of them.  One year my dad bought a CB radio for the car. It was super cool. Not only could I count the tires on the big trucks, but I was able to talk to the truckers as well. Looking back it is very interesting how I am not a truck driver today especially since I still love the big trucks the same as I did thirty-three years ago.

After graduating high school in 1987 I became a full time employee in the textbook department for Humble ISD. I had a really super cool boss and awesome job. When I got offered a position in the Technical Services department as a route technician, It was an extremely tough decision. After stressing over it for several days, I finally decided to accept the position. I was fixing audio visual equipment at nine different campuses. All of my model building days, as a ten year old started to pay off. It wasn’t until a year later, I started repairing Apple IIe and IBM Model computers and that’s when I knew, computer technician was the career for me.

While working as a computer technician I was going to College at night. I was working towards a two year associates degree in Business management.  Soon I became discouraged with college. I began to realize it was going to take me 6 years to get a two year associate degree going at night. Around the same time the district started replacing old mini-mainframe computer labs with networked IBM clone computers. They even hired Steve a Computer Network Technician. He talked about getting your CNE, Certified Netware Engineer certification and how having that certification you can land any network job out there.  The district would not pay for my classes, but they did allow me to take off to attend the courses. Two classes and $3000 dollars later, that training changed my life and my career.   

In 1991 I stopped taking college courses at night and in `93 I finished all the classes to become a Certified Netware Engineer. During the technology boom before Y2K, I bounce around from company to company. In 2001 I landed in Spring ISD. It wasn’t till Spring ISD that the highlight of my career started to flourish. The district was very technology rich and focused on providing the highest quality of technology to the students and to be immersed in that on a daily basis was the place for me to be.