Those of you who have been following this series of posts know that I am currently working on a plan to improve some aspects of my personal and professional technology life. Specifically I have set down some goals to improve in various areas including my proficiency with APA formatting as well as social and collaborative networking competencies. I've also committed to creating some kind of professional learning environment wherein other educators can hopefully glean some insight or find some useful information from my endless wanderings.
Fortunately, I have found several excellent resources that can help me toward my goals in a general sense. A simply search of Amazon for good APA reference guides along with some review of the contents of those books has lead me to a purchase that I feel will help me greatly in finally using APA format consistently and correctly. I have also researched several social networking tools and I've found two that greatly interest me. I don't know quite enough about them yet to give them a full recommendation but I intend to play with both of them over the next few weeks and see if they pass muster.
Elgg (http://community.elgg.org/) is a social networking open-source software toolset that essentially allows a user to create a social networking portal. The Elgg manager can create a site that contains a broad number of widgets and plugin tools that will allow him to add features and richness for his visitors and members. At the heart of Elgg is the ability to create and moderate blogs, chat boards, V-logs and collaborative file-sharing complete with source and version management. I haven't played with Elgg enough to know if it's a perfect fit, but certainly it may turn out to be an excellent tool for creating a social, collaborative network that other professionals can access and contribute to. This could be an excellent tool for both my current software position needs as well as my future teaching requirements.
Another tool Mahara, (http://mahara.org/) is a social networking tool geared toward learning and e-portfolio presentation. Mahara also allows a user to create online-learning communities. One of my goals is to create a source of information for other teachers to access and Mahara may be an excellent choice. There is some significant similarity between Mahara and Elgg, but clearly Mahara is more closely geared toward e-portfolio presentation and career learning. As I play with it more, I'll be better able to determine it's strengths compared to Elgg.
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Executing the "Game" plan... or...what I did for summer vacation
As I review my blog post about my game plan, it seems to be a bit ambitious in terms of goals. However, I'm hopeful that with the check-sheet I can at least make some progress on them and perhaps I'll discover that I need to focus on two or three of the goals and then expand to the others later. At any rate, as I mentioned in the earlier blog, one of the main things I need to achieve my goals is a decent book or resource on APA citation. The handbook included in one of my earlier courses just isn't sufficient to help me really learn APA format. I am certain that I can also find excellent resources on the web and likely a great first step would be to complile a list of those sites and references so I can choose a few. As for some of the other goals, I do have access to several excellent tools for networking and collaborative communication. My current company often uses Microsoft NetMeeting to manage remote conferences with people from around the country and I have a moderate understanding of how to use that program. Our education program through Walden also offers several great resources for communication and collaboration, although I've found that almost nobody ever visits the chat room. I should probably also make a list of good message boards and online collaboration resources. I've already located a number of good online blogs and journals that I am tracking through my reader so I have a fairly good start on my professional journal goal, although I'd like to continue tracking down good resources in that area. If anybody knows any good French education blogs I'd be happy to hear about them. As for my final goal of providing materials and aid to other teachers, my blog can serve as a great jumping-off point for that. Hopefully over time, I'll be able to include some videos, audiocasts and voice threads that can help other educators learn about emerging technologies and ways to use them.
Unfortunately I have been on extensive travel for work the last two weeks (hello from Baltimore, by the way). I haven't had much opportunity to do much in the way of 'getting started' although I have begun building my check-sheet in excel so I can attempt to track my progress on my goals.
Unfortunately I have been on extensive travel for work the last two weeks (hello from Baltimore, by the way). I haven't had much opportunity to do much in the way of 'getting started' although I have begun building my check-sheet in excel so I can attempt to track my progress on my goals.
Monday, March 15, 2010
Improving Educational Technology Integration.
I am focusing on areas where I feel I need improvement in my usage and implementation of technology based-education. Specifically, I am working on a plan to specifically identify weakness areas and improve my own fluency so I may be better prepared to teach my students and effectively lead by example.
Of the five NETS-T standards, I definitely feel the least comfortable with standard number 4, Promote and Model Digital Citizenship and Responsibility and number 5, Engage in Professional Growth and Leadership. In order to increase my confidence in these standards, I have set the following goals for myself:
A) Learn the necessary citation protocol for digital information and technology usage.
B) Develop a reasonable strategy for maximizing student access to technology, hardware and software in my learning environments
C) Learn how to work collaboratively and effectively with networked tools so I can pass this knowledge on to my students.
D) Make greater effort to communicate and collaborate with people through remote communication tools so I may become more proficient and comfortable and learn to escape the "lone island" mentality.
E) Make a definite effort to model collaborative and networked technology usage in constructive and meaningful ways so students can see the value of technological collaborative projects.
F) Find and subscribe to professional journals that can help me keep abridged of new developments in the field of educational technology.
G) Provide materials and aid to other teachers around me in order to help them become more comfortable with the tools, software and opportunities that continue to appear around us.
These goals should help me to improve my fluency in the NETS-T standards that I'm least comfortable with. In order to actually reach these goals, I'll need to put a few things in motion. First off, I'll need to find a better source book for APA format and citation. I'm not really comfortable with the materials I currently have and would like soemthing a bit clearer and more thorough. I'll also need to research some professional journals or blog-sites that can help me with current technological trends and opportunities so I can stay up to speed on new developments.
I need to commit more to communicating through blogs, chat sessions and message boards in order to improve my fluency. Using my RSS reader more faithfully to keep abridged of updates on some of my current tracked feeds would also help.
It is also important that I include a segment in my lesson-planning process for technology implementation and simply force myself to consider how I might implement technology in more of my lessons. Simply modifying my lesson-plan template could provide me a concrete reminder so I continue to focus on working technology into my lessons more effectively. I should also consider featuring a section of my blog-site on technology integration so I can highlight things I've tried as well as receive suggestions from other visitors about how they've used technology. This can help me as well as serve as a resource for some of the teachers around me as well as provide a good knowledge base for myself as I continue to improve my technology integration.
I think a good way of self-monitoring my progress in these areas would be to create a chart that would allow me to review my progress in my goals and action areas every two or three months. This would allow me to verify if I'm actually fulfilling my goals and working on the action items I've created. If I see that some items are simply not being fulfilled, I can review the goals and determine why I'm reticent to work on them. For those goals that I have improved on I can identify which actions were successful and perhaps find ways to modify my less attractive checklist items to come more in focus with activites that were successful for me. Once I see what things work well versus what things don't I should be able to modify my plan to give myself a better chance at maintaining the checklist and improving myself in my skill areas.
Of the five NETS-T standards, I definitely feel the least comfortable with standard number 4, Promote and Model Digital Citizenship and Responsibility and number 5, Engage in Professional Growth and Leadership. In order to increase my confidence in these standards, I have set the following goals for myself:
A) Learn the necessary citation protocol for digital information and technology usage.
B) Develop a reasonable strategy for maximizing student access to technology, hardware and software in my learning environments
C) Learn how to work collaboratively and effectively with networked tools so I can pass this knowledge on to my students.
D) Make greater effort to communicate and collaborate with people through remote communication tools so I may become more proficient and comfortable and learn to escape the "lone island" mentality.
E) Make a definite effort to model collaborative and networked technology usage in constructive and meaningful ways so students can see the value of technological collaborative projects.
F) Find and subscribe to professional journals that can help me keep abridged of new developments in the field of educational technology.
G) Provide materials and aid to other teachers around me in order to help them become more comfortable with the tools, software and opportunities that continue to appear around us.
These goals should help me to improve my fluency in the NETS-T standards that I'm least comfortable with. In order to actually reach these goals, I'll need to put a few things in motion. First off, I'll need to find a better source book for APA format and citation. I'm not really comfortable with the materials I currently have and would like soemthing a bit clearer and more thorough. I'll also need to research some professional journals or blog-sites that can help me with current technological trends and opportunities so I can stay up to speed on new developments.
I need to commit more to communicating through blogs, chat sessions and message boards in order to improve my fluency. Using my RSS reader more faithfully to keep abridged of updates on some of my current tracked feeds would also help.
It is also important that I include a segment in my lesson-planning process for technology implementation and simply force myself to consider how I might implement technology in more of my lessons. Simply modifying my lesson-plan template could provide me a concrete reminder so I continue to focus on working technology into my lessons more effectively. I should also consider featuring a section of my blog-site on technology integration so I can highlight things I've tried as well as receive suggestions from other visitors about how they've used technology. This can help me as well as serve as a resource for some of the teachers around me as well as provide a good knowledge base for myself as I continue to improve my technology integration.
I think a good way of self-monitoring my progress in these areas would be to create a chart that would allow me to review my progress in my goals and action areas every two or three months. This would allow me to verify if I'm actually fulfilling my goals and working on the action items I've created. If I see that some items are simply not being fulfilled, I can review the goals and determine why I'm reticent to work on them. For those goals that I have improved on I can identify which actions were successful and perhaps find ways to modify my less attractive checklist items to come more in focus with activites that were successful for me. Once I see what things work well versus what things don't I should be able to modify my plan to give myself a better chance at maintaining the checklist and improving myself in my skill areas.
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