Accreditation is a 2-3 year process that all schools must go through every 10 years or so to essentially make sure they are doing their job as a school. While I was a teacher at Castle High School, the time came for us to go through this grueling process. The entire faculty and staff were split into about 5 teams to work on each section of our accreditation write up and I was chosen to be the technology leader for one of the teams.

The accreditation process was obviously not a new thing for the school and some of the more seasoned teachers had been through many successful accreditations in their career. However, this was the first time they did the entire process electronically instead of creating a giant binder hard copy. Therefore, my knowledge of Google Drive and Google Apps are what got me appointed Tech Team Leader. My main responsibilities included leading meetings, formatting the document, training teachers on uploading & linking resources, and most importantly, maintaining the resource folders and making sure all the links worked.

This was overall one of the largest projects I've ever been a part of. Because the project stretched over 2 school years, time management was a huge part of making sure everything got done on time. One thing I found challenging was that I was the youngest teacher and had never been through the process before, but I still had act in a leadership position. Getting older, more seasoned teachers to adhere to my deadlines, was not always the easiest and required a lot of emails, reminders, and sometimes begging on my part. One thing I enjoyed was getting to share my knowledge about Google Docs with teachers who don't usually use a lot of technology in their classrooms. I think I inspired some of them to incorporate more technology in their every day classes, not just the accreditation process. It was also really exciting to be part of the first completely paperless accreditation portfolio.

In the end, our school passed with flying colors and I learned a lot about being a young leader.