Professional Learning Plan

You can skip the following video and read my comments about my PLN, or you can simply watch me talk about it!


As a student in the Masters in Teaching and Curriculum program, and also working towards a personal goal of earning a certificate for teaching with technology, I have followed two major goals: obtaining skills to enhance the learning experience for my students, and increasing my own personal efficacy as a teacher. I have had the opportunity to work in environments where technology was readily available, and in environments where technology was near non-existent.
While enrolled in CEP 810 in the fall of 2011, I identified some specific goals I had for myself as far as my use of technology as an educator is concerned.

• I wanted to stop simply using technology as a presentation tool I myself used, and start having students be the main users of the technology.
• I wanted to begin to re-purpose technology originally meant for other uses in order to incite student interest and to improve my own instruction.
• I wanted to transform my class websites from being a storage place of class materials to a forum for collaboration.
• By using Google Docs (Now known as Drive)
• I wanted to increase my social media presence.
• I wanted to begin the process of creating flipped instruction.

Most of the goals I set for myself at that time have been either fulfilled or partially fulfilled. I now use technology to present my classroom instruction nearly every day, but I also ask my students to respond to me using the same technology technology. For example, my daily warm ups are presented on our course site, and students must navigate to the warm up themselves in order to respond.

 

In addition to using my course site in a more interactive way, I have implemented the use of Google Docs. First, I instructed students on how to use docs one-on-one. Then I taught students to create their own docs. And now my students are creating docs from templates, on their own, and collaborating in groups of 1-30 students. We have done so much collaboration that several times Google has actually maxed out our documents and put students on a waiting list to participate.

This is a Google Spreadsheet my student uses to keep track of their typing scores.

This is a picture of a Google Doc I downloaded. Every student wrote what they thought on here, and then they responded to one another. In 5 minutes of work, 19 7th graders wrote a seven page document.

This student made their own post card using a template provided to them through Google Presentation

In order to make my instruction so tech based, and to get my students using the same technology, I have had to do a lot of instruction on how to use the technology. The thing about that is that everyone learns at very different paces in this regard particularly, and a lot of comfort in using technology is based on repetition. As such, I wanted my instruction to be such that students could make me go back and re-explain things. The best way to do that was to make recordings and screen casts, and that is exactly what I have done. In fact, there have been days that I had to go to meetings and I still gave instructions and/or lectures through the magic of the internet.

This is an assignment I have students while I was out. In the video at the top, I did a screencast where I went through the process (again) of how to use the program, and then talked a little bit about the assignment and the content that is involved in it. The "Post Card" above is the end product of this assignment.

With less success, I have begun to re-purpose technology for the classroom. I am currently working with another teacher to create an interactive whiteboard using Wii remotes and an IR pen. We have been delayed in our project first from being an a waiting list for the IR pen for about an month, and then when our shared LCD projector was stolen. We now have everything in place and have begun testing, but have not gotten everything quite right yet. I have also been experimenting with using cell phones in the classroom, but have experienced some difficulty with reception. At this point, using web based questionnaires and quizzes seems to be much more reliable.

I have mostly failed to create a social media presence. I felt I was communicating a great deal through my course page and mass email, and at that point social media did not seem like a platform I would gain much from. At this time, that is no longer a goal of mine, but I will continue to evaluate that status in the future.

As I move forward, I want to continue to develop and advance these goals. I am also going to begin to commit a lot more time to collaborating with other teachers in order to create my flipped instruction. I have always believed that two heads are better than one, and now that I feel more comfortable in my own skin as an educator, I think I can begin to share myself and embrace the identity of others as well. I will mostly complete this work with coworkers on site, but I may also look to my personal support network, and the greater network of social studies and technology educators as well.

Support Group Map from a previous course