Key Concept 16: Professional Advancement
16.1 Candidates will be able to actively engage in professional learning networks (PLN) to collaborate and share ideas and resources with colleagues.
I began to create my PLN over 8 years ago, but as a passive consumer of other people's ideas. I have actively followed other teacher's blogs using Feedly to curate RSS feeds from at least five different technology related blogs. I also started using the forums available via the College Board website when I began teaching AP Chemistry. Neither of these platforms however involved me as an active participant in the sharing of ideas or directly collaborating with others.
I have not stopped following any of my blogs and that is still the primary method I learn about any new technologies. But in my content areas, I participate in collaborative efforts through Facebook Groups for AP Chemistry and shared Dropbox folders with other district Chemistry teachers. More and more teachers left the College Board forums in favor of the Facebook Group for AP Chemistry as the platform was less clunky, it was easier to share documents and links, and newer teachers are seemingly more comfortable with the social media platform. Since joining the group over two years ago I have solicited help when I am stuck as well as contributing lab ideas and the special expertise I gained in having taught a visually impaired student in class.
The AP Chemistry Teachers Facebook group has over 3000 members all of whom have to prove they area teachers of AP Chemistry by sharing their College Board Course Audit credentials.
I share technology apps that I come across in the blogs that I follow.
I have experience with teaching visually impaired students and have provided instructional assistance to fellow teachers as needed.
One of the most valuable uses of this group is the sharing of labs and other resources. I have downloaded labs shared by others and freely shared labs that I have created as well.
There are always lively discussions around different technology platforms to use for the creation of videos for flipped learning as it is a very popular instructional method for many science teachers, especially AP teachers who have such a large amount of content to cover.
I also trust the opinion of peers on this site when it comes to paid resources. I would never advocate for the purchase of any resource by my school or district without checking with my peers on this site first.
My school district does not have a set curriculum for the sciences outside of a list of standards. Teachers have a lot of flexibility in terms of what materials they want to use, what labs to use in class, not to mention assessments. While this is great for a lot of teachers, some teachers really struggle with creating materials or curating other materials to use. The district holds professional development three times during the year for the content groups and during this time the chemistry teachers often share resources. I had previously paid for a Business Plan on Dropbox to hold a terrabyte of data in the cloud to use with my department at school, so I offered to host shared folders for the Chemistry teachers so that we could share materials primarily for the newer teachers to use. In addition, when we had a visually impaired student at our school, we had to deal with large amounts of files of large size to communicate with District Vision Team and the student's technology. We created a file structure system to have everyone follow as well as common file naming systems to help the teachers, Vision Team, and the student keep everything organized.
This is a sampling of some of the shared folders for Chemistry. Instead of creating a new folder every year, we have continued to add new teachers to existing folders so the earliest folder we created, the 201617 folder has the most shared members on it. I have not removed any teachers from having access even if they have left the district because the settings are such that no one can remove items from the shared folders, only make copies or add material.
This was a listing of the senior courses for our Visually impaired student with all of the teachers, braillers, occupational therapists, and other Visio Team members who needed access to the instructional content of the student's classes.
This was the first year of the creation of the Dropbox group for the sharing of curricular and instructional materials.
16.2 Candidates will be able to determine and implement the best approaches to improving their technology integration efforts through a continual process of self-evaluation and reflection.
One of the most beneficial things to my career as a teacher was a graduate course I took over 10 years ago on using Web 2.0 Tools in Science Instruction through Montana State University. That course is what led to me years later entering this entire Education Technology Program. The thing that I have maintained ever since that class is my PLN feed of technology resource blogs. This is where I get new ideas to try in my own classroom or things to recommend to other teachers in different content areas. This is how I became known as the "technology person" in the building.
This is where I first learned about video creation and flipping classrooms. This is how I learned how to even use the old smartboard I found in my building years ago. And I would imagine that this is one of the ways that I will learn about all of the new things that are coming down the pike in the future. I have added to this listing of blogs during this program and will continue to do so in order to widen the types of knowledge that comes my way. I need to expand into 3D printing and robotics to stay current in my content area as well as reach out into technology tools for arts education so that I can help all of the faculty in my building.
I also have the benefit of being both the department chair for science and the grade level lead for the 10th grade. While this is lots of work on my part, it does give me direct influence on the types of instructional methods and curricular tools that we use. I have been able to get every science teacher to use video assignments, either through EdPuzzle or embedded videos in Google Forms, over the last three years. As our district has purchased a package for PlayPosit, it seems I will be spending my summer learning how to use it so that I can switch us all over to that platform for the next school year.
As the 10th grade PLC lead, which was a new concept for our school this year, I really used the opportunity for a lot of team building before diving into my internship project on formative assessments. We generated excitement about spending time at the end of this school year and over the summer to create common systems that will streamline things for ourselves and our students. To prepare for this, I surveyed my teachers at the end of the internship process, specifically asking in one of my questions, what future things should we focus on as a grade level team. This feedback provides me with direction for my next steps with the team before the end of this year, as well as what work I need to do over the summer in preparation for any professional development I need to lead when we return. While a consensus was not reached, we do have a starting point for further discussions. Ultimately, I want to teach myself how to use Canvas for use as a fully functional LMS with my classes. My district has purchased the access but has had so much turnover in central office staffing that teaching staff have never been trained on how to use it, so it primarily gets used to set up "courses" for different teams at central office. This seems like a colossal waste of money and I would like to see if I can better utilize the platform. This is lower down on my priority list however as there is always the chance that the new chancellor in place will either not renew this contract or actually push training out to teachers, either option making my decision easier.
