I started a summer internship this week with Albemarle County Public Schools’ Department of Accountability, Research and Technology (DART). There was a paid internship opportunity for six people, but I must have applied too late because I didn’t get it, but they’re still letting me do it for free! How nice of them!

I applied for this internship because I want to learn more about the technical side of Instructional Technology. Last summer there was a job posting for the Director of Technology in a local district. I printed out the job description and gave it to my former advisor and said “I’d like to learn how to do these things this summer.” He was supposed to be arranging an internship for me at the time, but it never materialized. So here I am learning it now! I’m pretty excited about it.

I only started yesterday, and I am working at one of the high schools this week. CFA rents the building for the summer to grade exams, so all of the computers in the building have to be moved to the wood shop so that the school computer technician can access them for servicing while the rest of the building is off-limits. CFA is moving in on Sunday, so I was helping break down and move all of the computers. We did that all day long yesterday and finished this morning.

This afternoon I got to do some new things. I switched out a broken hard drive on a laptop, then imaged the drive with the Albemarle stock image. Then I started to disassemble an entire Lenovo laptop to replace the casing and some wires that were broken. As boring as that might seem to some people, I really enjoyed it. It was like a puzzle, taking the computer apart and then putting it back together again. I think that tomorrow I’m going to do the same thing with a MacBook Pro. I don’t know what else I’ll do this week.

Next week I’m going to be at a middle school that is starting a 1:1 laptop program with all students. I’ll probably be doing a lot of inventory stuff, opening boxes and labeling machines. I’m sure I’ll learn a lot and I’m happy to help out.

On June 17, 2014   /   Musings   /   Leave a comment