Technology+Leader+and+Facilitator+Standard+V+Reflection

This standard focuses on teacher usage of modern technologies to increase their own professional productivity and learning. The use of communication technologies allows teachers to develop learning communities outside of their campus and district to further their knowledge about teaching and receive feedback on their classroom practices from a wider audience. The performance tasks include identifying resources and participating in professional development activities and organizations to support ongoing professional growth related to technology; give out information on district policies for the professional opportunities for staff, faculty, and administrators; evaluate and reflect on educational practice related to the use of technology in order to make educated decisions about technology use in support of student learning; model advanced features of various productivity software; assist teachers in finding and using video and digital images in a variety of formats to use in presentations, publications and other products; demonstrate the use of electronic device designed for a specific purpose (graphing calculators, translators, etc.) within the context of a subject area; use various distance learning systems in the support of personal and professional development; use the principles of instructional design to develop hypermedia and multimedia products to help in personal and professional development; select the correct tools for communicating concepts, conducting research, and solving problems for an intended audience and purpose; use samples of emerging programming, authoring, or problem-solving environments that support personal and professional development; set and change preferences, defaults and other selectable features of commonly used productivity tools in PK-12 schools; model using telecommunication tools and resources for information sharing, remote information access, and multimedia/hypermedia publishing to nurture student learning; communicate and discuss with colleagues current research to support instruction using applications including e-mail, online conferencing and Web browsers; participate in online collaborative curricular projects and team activities to build bodies of knowledge about specific topics; and design, develop and maintain Web pages and site that support communication between school and community (Williamson, 2009).

To help teachers choose the appropriate technology resources for their classrooms, I began a website to evaluate various resources including books, websites, computer programs, and online services. The site’s blog format allows teachers to give feedback on the items reviewed, and share their own experiences with the materials discussed. There polls included as well, and the about section asks people to suggest sites, services, and software to review. My intent is to convert it from a Blog to a fully interactive web site at a future date to include forums, etc. if the traffic becomes high enough. I am still trying to figure out how to increase traffic to my web site, and how to get people to comment on it to make it more of a forum and a place to exchange ideas. I know this would be easier outside of a blog format, but until there are regular readers it is not worth the expense to pay for a host.

Developing the professional development day, also ties directly into this standard. Developing a practical, useful, and learner centered professional development for teachers was very important to me. It was also challenging as useful is a subjective term, and people will not always agree on what makes a workshop useful. As a teacher, I get very frustrated with workshops where what we are doing doesn’t apply directly to my classroom. I wanted this day to be completely practical for the teachers. The workshop is set up so that they are being taught to use the software they will be implementing in their by creating content they will actually use in the classroom to meet an area of need for their students. The complication comes in when trying to ensure useful and regular follow up training. Teachers don’t want to miss class time to keep up with their training. My solution to this was to develop a flexible, small group workshop system within the school day. It is scheduled so that teachers get time to work with the software outside of class while developing materials to use in instruction at least once during a nine weeks period. The teachers give up one conference period in a nine weeks, to let a partner teacher have a two hour block to work on classroom materials. Then the favor is returned for the other teacher. This allows further develop of technology skills and implementation of technology in the classroom with the minimal time out of class. It also provides an opportunity for one-to-one or small-group assistance from the technologist.