Chris Pultz

Instructional Technology Coaching, Training and Support for Lincoln Public Schools

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What I Do

Sometimes people wonder what I do when I am not standing in front of a room full of people, actively engaged in the act of training. It’s a legitimate question, since training only takes 2 or 4 hours out of an average week. (Though sometimes much more.) You may or may not be surprised to learn that in this day and age, standing in front of a room full of people is becoming the least of the ways in which training is delivered by Computing Services. Much of my work is not destined for paper, but for the web.

While no two days look the same, here are the sorts of things you might find me doing…

I might be preparing for a training. That includes creating web or video resources, updating handouts, printing sign-in sheets for the Staff Development department, setting up laptops, etc.

There is a good chance I am responding to a support request. My phone rings many times each week with people who have attended a training I led asking follow-up questions as they run into problems. I’m also in the Helpdesk ticket queue, so a ticket may have been routed to me automatically, or as something that needs further investigation.

I am a member of the Technology Affiliate Group (TAG) of the state wide Educational Service Units (ESUs). I’m currently the programming chair, so I am coordinating the training days for these meetings that happen about 5 times a year somewhere in Nebraska.

I might be in a meeting. Thankfully, I do not spend as much time in meetings as some of my colleagues, but once or twice a week you can probably find me in a room discussing all sorts of things related to the use of technology by staff members across LPS.

I’m a huge proponent of the use of RSS feeds to bring all of the world’s news to my desktop. I pride myself on being aware of the pressing technology issues of the day, particularly of the educational use of technology. Therefore, at least once a day I pause to scan headlines and mark news stories, articles and blog posts for followup.

You may or may not realize that for every topic that our department supports, or question we answer frequently, there is a corresponding web page. I don’t make all of them. I make quite a few, though. At the bottom of the page I’ll include a handful of examples.

For many of the initiatives we support a video just seems like the appropriate medium for getting the word out. People seem to appreciate them, which only encourages us to make more. If you have seen video tutorials for the Student Information System (SIS), Elementary Report Card (ERC), Multifunction Devices (copiers), setting up printers, or using DocuShare I probably produced those. Again, I’ll include a couple of examples below.

I train and support a lot of different pieces of software. It would just make sense that I need to be fluent in their usage. Sometimes I am learning a new piece of software.

Some of the tools we support don’t work exactly the way we need them to right out of the box. I’m occasionally involved with testing them before they are released to all users, or when people report problems with the tool.

The only thing I have learned for certain about technology is that it NEVER. STOPS. EVOLVING. Because of this, many times each year there is cause to create a brand new training workshop. Sometimes they are one time sessions that are for a specific audience, other times they have a much wider scope and take quite a bit of time to create.