My Professional Growth Plan

Goal 1: Be more confident teaching a class by September 2009

In order for me to feel more confident teaching a class, I feel that I need more experience and I need to be able to be comfortable there. Some strategies to allow me to get more experience and develop confidence are:
1) Volunteer in a classroom
2) Take leadership roles in school groups
3) Do more presentations in front of larger groups
4) Take a leadership course

I have already begun this process. I have started to volunteer in a grade 6 classroom, where the teachers will allow me to teach the odd lesson. This will give me more experience. To develop my confidence, I have taken a leadership course through the UCL at the University of Calgary.

Goal 2: Integrate technology into more of my lessons by December 2009

To increase the amount of technology I use in lessons that I create, there are a few things that I need to do. I feel that I need to develop a deeper understanding of how to use technology, I need to know about how to obtain different types of technology, I need to feel more comfortable and confident in the different uses of technology to create meaningful learning experiences. Some strategies are:
1) Take a course about using technology in the classroom
2) Find resources about the different types of technology available for students and teachers
3) Find resources about new and updated technology
4) Take a course to further my knowledge about certain types of technology

I have started to develop my deeper understanding of technology and how to use it effectively as a meaningful learning tool. I have enrolled in the Technology SIPS course where we were told about many types of technology for a wide range of uses. One resource that I am glad to have is www.innovativelearning.com. This shows all types of assistive technology that is available to schools and teachers, and gives a description about what each type of technology is best used for. I also recently came across a magazine called Popular Science. This magazine contains information and articles about a wide variety of new and interesting types of technology and technological advances in many professions from medicine to athletics. There are many courses about technology through SAIT, Mount Royal, and other companies where I can deepen my understanding of the uses of applications such as PowerPoint, iMovie, iWeb, etc. I plan on taking a couple of these courses when I finish the MT program.

Goal 3: Keep a balance between my personal and professional lives by completing all school work by 7:00 pm on school nights by October 1, 2009, 6:00 by October 1, 2010 and 5:00 by October 1, 2011

This is going to be the most difficult thing for me to do because, as a beginning teacher, I will most likely be caught up in trying to plan for every possible thing that could occur in every lesson. I could spend countless hours developing lesson and unit plans and neglecting my family. To accomplish this task, I need to be cognizant of a few things when creating lesson and unit plans:
1) Keep them open-ended, yet structured to give students choice, and to limit the amount of home time I need to spend on the projects
2) Include peer and self assessments to aid me in assessing final projects or assignments
3) Inquiry takes a lot of meaningful planning in the beginning, but limits the amount of planning needed throughout the unit
4) Differentiation comes easier when I know each student’s strengths and weaknesses
5) Formative assessments are very helpful to the students and the teacher at that time as well as when it comes time for the summative assessment piece
6) The best way to make students responsible for their schoolwork is to let them be a player in the creation of their schoolwork. This will limit the amount of home time that I will need to spend on the creation of lessons, units, rubrics, etc.

This is going to be an ongoing battle, but I feel that if I keep all of these statements in mind during my teaching and “homework”, it will help me develop ways in which to accomplish these goals by the dates provided.

My IO Experience

What can I say? IO was a great tool for organizing everything a teacher would want to consider in creating a unit plan. It included more important things such as student engagement, and how you plan to integrate technology and what technology it is, what outcomes it meets and more importantly, it gives you a "Learn How" tab that lets you see if you are using technology usefully, efficiently, effectively and meaningful, or if you are using it just for the sake of including it to say you "covered" that part of the expectations. It provided a critical thinking element to the way we created our unit. I was constantly thinking about the quality of the tasks/activities, how I chose to integrate technology, how meaningful the task was, and how the task flowed with the rest of the unit. It was very helpful for me to see what the other tasks and activities were so I could build off them, include my own touches, and still meet the SLEs and GLEs. This is awesome, especially for beginner teachers because it has everything you would want to consider in a single page. You can quickly browse through your unit to make sure that it flows the way you wanted it to. My favorite part of creating the unit using IO is the online collaboration. As a creator, you can invite people to view or contribute to your unit, and they contribute in real time. It is like google docs for unit plans. I think it is an exceptional resource for teachers that require a little bit more help in the organization aspects of planning a unit (like me).

Enough of preaching IO. On to the juicy stuff. Our presentation of the unit went quite well. I have to admit, the suggestion of the invitation to participate in the Inventor's Workshop was great. It immediately drew the assessors into our unit, and they were excited to be able to be a part of it. If it worked this well with adults, it will for sure catch the attention of a wide range of students from the unmotivated to the "too cool for school" students. It is like the hand written, post office-mailed letter. Everybody gets excited when they get a letter addressed to them in the mail, and the students would really enjoy having a self addressed invitation to the unit plan. Also, it serves as a unit outline for the students. It lets them know what is next on their plate, and allows them to be engaged from step one.

The groups assessing our unit plan enjoyed the tasks and activities that we had planned out. They said that the activities would be engaging, enjoyable, and had an aspect of building, creating, imagination, and best of all, FUN! It was written in between the lines in the assessment, but I think that if the groups were asked explicitly if the students would have fun, they would say yes. If they were asked if the students would learn life skills from this, they would say yes, definitely. The feedback we got was not all positive, which is quite helpful. One comment that resonated with me was wether or not the reading and games in some of the websites for the Wheels and Levers task were age appropriate. This resonated with me because I was the one who created the activities for it. Thinking about the quality of the websites, I realized that a couple of them were geared toward older students, and a couple were for younger students. I was thinking that I would include them for the "lower" and "higher" students, but this comment made me rethink my extensions and modifications. The fact was, they were working in groups, and their group members would aid their learning. For the students that are more advanced, they would be able to draw further connections and develop a deeper meaning - not only for themselves, but for the entire group. That would be their extension should they choose to extend their meaning of the activity. I chose to delete some of those sites because I felt they were not as appropriate for the students and the topic.

From this, I learned a lot about how to actually create a unit, and most of all, I learned how meaningful, helpful and necessary collaboration is in the creation/development of any unit, but especially an inquiry based unit.

Just another reflection?

After the presentation (or lack there of) of our focused task, I think that we did quite well. I feel that we completed the task the way we were supposed to. We may not have made it as interactive for the assessers of our work, but I feel that the movie that we created was informative, creative, and engaging. I think that students and adults alike would enjoy reading, listening and watching our movie. There was one thing that I feel we could have done a little bit better.

I think that the movie was a little long at 7 minutes. I think a 3-5 minute maximum on the movie would have been sufficient, but, to be honest, I didn't have any say in the creation aspect of the movie. My partner and I had waited until the last possible moment to begin the final phase of our task, which was not as big a mistake as one may be led to believe. I feel that we did very well. Not just well for our self-manufactured time constraints, but well in general. I think that the planning phase of our task took longer, and to put it all together just took a larger chunk out of our day.

My partner spent the majority of his day putting the movie together, and I spent the majority of my day putting together the rubrics. In building the rubric for assessing my own students on this task, I tried to make it appealing to them, and I tried to color code it in order of importance. The bottom portion of the rubric, was I felt, the most important. It was the base, the dirt, the earth of the task. Without it, the rest was just satisfactory at best. Chances of the task doing well without the base being fulfilled were slim. The rest of the criteria were based in order of importance. Use of technology was one of the requirements of the task, so I chose that second. Lastly, still important however, was the organization of the material for the presentation. I put that last because the students would be able to discuss and prove themselves and why/what they did in their final response. They would also be able to give a sort of self assessment in their final response to substantiate their choices.

I chose not to include numbers on their rubric because I would rather them be focused on more constructive assessments than just a 1, 2, 3 or 4. I think that the words being there does not stress them out as much ("Oh, I NEED a 4 on this"). They can say "Oh, I'm getting there", or "it looks like I need to do more work next time). Even the title of my rubric is less intimidating than plain old rubric. I think it leads students to feel that they aren't being assessed as much as being provided feedback, as the title reads "How did you do?"

The rubric that I created for our peers to assess us was geared towards how we would do as teachers creating a task including technology. I felt that feedback from our peers about how they feel we would be able to interpret the tasks and essentially the program of studies through a technological lens. I hoped in creating it that our peers would give constructive feedback on how they feel we could better ourselves as teachers, not at how we completed the task - and it worked out! Our peers gave us great insight, questions, and concerns about our task, how we chose to complete it, and how that reflected our teaching image. Their feedback was very helpful, and creating the summary of their assessment allowed me to look at my practice while reading their responses, and see how I felt about topics/issues, and how I would deal with them as a practicing teacher. It wasn't just another reflection to me.

Reflection of a Showcase

I would first like to say that it is ironic writing a blog about a showcase that we facilitated about blogs!

As we did our research about blogs and their relationship with FOIP, I began to think of the different ways that I have used blogish tools in some of my university classes.  I remember my General Studies 300 class, where we participated in an online discussion group as a class and posted our thoughts on pertinent topics and reacted to quotes.  I think that this was a very helpful tool because I was able to read what other people thought about the same things, find similarities and differences, and reflect on my own thoughts and opinions with their thoughts in mind.  It helped me refine my ideas more than just reading and forgetting about the readings after the class.

I would like to develop something like this in my classroom, using one of the hosts we found, ePals.  I think that it would be secure enough to protect the students, school, and the people around them.  One of the most convincing traits they have is that the administrator (teacher, principal or both) can monitor and moderate the messages that are sent and received by the parties.  You can also develop a filter that will automatically filter out messages that contain keywords or phrases that you would not like to have in your classroom (online and in-person).

Before we did this showcase, I was unsure about how I would use blogs in the classroom effectively, but doing the research myself allowed me to solidify some alternatives to regular in-person class discussions.  One of the big fallbacks would be if I am in a location where students do not necessarily have access at home.  If this were the case, I don't think I would be able to develop the type of classroom I am striving for.

One major thing that I learned was to get consent forms signed by the parents of the students, and to clear anything that has a chance of "breaking" the FOIP regulations with the administration at my school.  From there, they will be able to either back me, or tell me where to go to clarify the regulations for me - and let me know if I can ultimately do what I am planning to do.

Overall, I think that it was a productive and successful showcase, and I at least learned a lot from it.

What do I expect from the ICT class?

ICT is such a broad topic, and I thought I knew enough about it to get by.  When I started trying to use it for teaching/educational purposes, it became harder.  It seemed that I needed to use the Smartboard for my lessons, but the Smartboards in my schools were portable, and connections became loose, computers stopped recognizing the hardware, and many other problems arose that I had no clue about how to fix.  I would like to know not only how to use the Smartboard (and create lessons efficiently), but I would also like to know about other types of ICT that can help me in my teaching.  I would like to have a technology literate classroom, where the students aren't in awe every time we use it.  I would like it to be an every day type of occurrence - yet still be useful, helpful, and engaging.

I would also like to know how to use ICT in a way to support and encourage inquiry instead of stretching to try manufacture inquiry.  I would like it to be seamless and natural instead of unnatural and awkward for the students.  

I suppose the biggest question for me is how can I use technology in a school that doesn't have a whole lot of it.  Both of my practicum schools had one or two Smartboards, and a computer lab, and 1 class set of laptops, but you always had to sign up 2-3 weeks in advance to use these things.  I think that if I want to have my technology literate classroom, I would need constantly and easily accessible technology whenever the situation arises.  If a student asks a good question about a topic which would be a great starting, mid, or ending point for that topic, I would like to have immediate access to some form of technology so we can pursue it as a class, in groups, or individually.  For some reason, I don't think it would be as interesting if we pursued that question 2 weeks later, after we had covered many other things in the meantime.  I suppose my biggest want in a classroom would be that I don't want to have to put off discussing something fully because we do not have access to it.  I also don't want the technology to be some sort of commodity that makes it special when we get to use it.

So to get back to my question, what are some alternatives to technology when you do not have it "at your fingertips", and how would one go about getting it "at their fingertips"?