Thing 23 Now What Do I Do?

This has been an amazing journey for me! I thought I had some technology skills (and I did) but I had no idea what was available to me both personally and professionally! The exercises I've completed and the applications I've used have truly been life-changing for me and for my students.

My thinking on teaching has been greatly influenced by Charlotte Danielson's [I put that link in, isn't that cool?] work on the four domains of teaching, so I'll sum up my learning using her basic framework. Just in case you aren't familiar, two of the domains are visible: classroom environment and instruction and two are invisible (but critical): planning/reflection and professional contributions.

The potential to contribute professionally is obviously all around me. I've been sharing what I've learned with staff and community members both in my program and out. I've offered to lead a portion of our first staff development session in the fall to share some of the tools I've found useful. The best sharing, though, comes from making time to sit alongside a teacher and help them get their own accounts, pages, blogs started. I hope to make time to do that, this summer with a couple of my colleagues. Having this blog to look back on and remind myself of potential uses for these tools will be extremely helpful.

Many of these tools will assist me in planning for the upcoming school year. Enhancing my website with links to relevant material for students, adding widgets that make my site interactive and putting enough of the right kind of information on it will make it a "must visit" for my students. This will enable me to put some of my long-term planning, which I've gotten good at in a shareable format and let the students take on more responsibility for managing their learning.

The other area of planning is for student use of the tools. I wrote an entry about www.kidblog.org and am piloting that with a class, now. I've discovered a lot, including that I will require correct spelling and grammar! I also assume that the young people intuitively know more about technology, but many of my students didn't understand title versus post versus comment boxes. Having a month or so to try this out has been invaluable and will improve the experience for next year's bloggers.

Students will benefit from being able to use the flashcard site. I'll benefit from being able to check some work on line. We've transitioned to teaching, so I'll continue in that vein. The Wiki presents obvious possibilities for student writing and collaboration. I like the idea of posting assignments, quizzes and tests for students. They have planners, but they only work when open :)! I think I will also make use of the calendar feature on my website for this.

With greater on line options for students, I see greater possibilities for individualizing instruction. Taking the example of the new student (from a previous post), I anticipate being able to direct him to materials that will be appropriate for him and help him to catch up. Some of my students blog posts indicate interests that I can perhaps link to materials that will interest them.

The classroom environment may change considerably. My schools have computer labs, but I've largely stayed out of them. Now I can anticipate scheduling 1-2 sessions per week in the lab so that all students have access to the tools we'll be using while at school. I've had one student respond to a blog question by doing his own research above and beyond what we've done in class. I'm hoping this kind of motivation will be contagious and Spanish will be a class they think of first rather than last when doing homework. Hey, a teacher can dream!

One of the biggest challenges is for me to keep practicing with these tools and adding others to my repertoire! I'd love to have a follow-up opportunity through Wayne RESA. I will certainly use these as much as I can on my own, but having a session and a deadline can be very motivating! My most regular source for what's new will most likely be Delicious [I couldn't help myself, before this I didn't know how easy it is!] Thanks for the opportunity to improve my teaching!