Plan For Professional Development
There are a plethora of web resources available to teachers and vast list of tools will only continue to grow. From Khan Academy to YouTube, valuable and free resources abound. My goal as a teacher for the years to come is to learn about and teach my students about two topics in educational technology.
The first topic I wish to incorporate into my teaching and continue to learn about is the Creative Commons. Creative Commons allows people to license their digital work easily and with strong legal infrastructure. Oftentimes, students take images, video or music from the internet without much though as to copyright or ownership.
In order to teach my students what the Creative Commons is, I can show them the following video:
The first topic I wish to incorporate into my teaching and continue to learn about is the Creative Commons. Creative Commons allows people to license their digital work easily and with strong legal infrastructure. Oftentimes, students take images, video or music from the internet without much though as to copyright or ownership.
In order to teach my students what the Creative Commons is, I can show them the following video:
In order to explore the Creative Commons more, students can use Flickr, Advanced Google Search, Creative Commons search and Jamendo to develop their searching fluency. Projects could range from collecting free and Creative Commons images that represent student interest, to more math focused work like researching mathematicians.
Almost any material needed to create a digital product can be found using these search tools, although it may take a little more work than doing a standard Google search. This additional effort is something I will need to overcome with my middle school students and I look forward to the list of Creative Commons search tools expanding in the years to follow.
Additionally, while exploring Creative Commons search tools, I will discuss with my students what makes a good source, web site or other resource. I expect students to brainstorm and generate a list of what makes a source legitimate, quality and worth using. Below is a list of question and thoughts about sources I developed in our classroom forum. These are similar to questions my students will ask, especially with some guidance form me. With a well-developed list of criteria for good quality sources, classes can debate, discuss and decide what the expectation will be for my classroom, in terms of resources students will use.
Questions, criteria and strategies I use when reviewing websites:
Confidence building items:
There is one large barrier to students applying these skills. Most students want to find information and content they need as fast as possible. Often, when searching for media that is appropriate and legal to use, it takes more time. I will need to emphasize and reteach the importance of using other peoples work appropriately.
The next topic I will develop in my teaching and learning is the Open Education movement. This movement has the goal of providing top tier education to anyone with access to a computer and the internet. The video below describes this quite well:
Questions, criteria and strategies I use when reviewing websites:
- Is this site useful to my teaching?
- Is this site useful to my students?
- Will my students be able to use this site easily?
- Will students use the site independently?
- Can the site be used on mobile devices?
- Will my students learn from the tools available here?
- Is the site valuable enough for me to spend time on?
- Who is funding this site? Who supports the content?
- Is there a message they are trying to send? Are they pushing an agenda?
- Is the site a product pusher? Do they want to sell me something that I am not going to buy?
- Is the site updated regularly? Are they date stamps on posts and other resources?
- What age group is the site intended for?
- Is the material appropriate for classroom use?
- Is there anything weird about the site? Is the format different? Is the text too small or large? Is there cohesion amongst pages?
Confidence building items:
- No pop-ups
- Reasonable amounts of advertising or no advertising
- Visually appealing, meaning the site looks nice and has a good flow. I can find what I want.
- Links, files, pictures, video and other related items work upwards of 95 percent of the time.
- No links or resources leading to outside content, that doesn't meet the requirements above.
There is one large barrier to students applying these skills. Most students want to find information and content they need as fast as possible. Often, when searching for media that is appropriate and legal to use, it takes more time. I will need to emphasize and reteach the importance of using other peoples work appropriately.
The next topic I will develop in my teaching and learning is the Open Education movement. This movement has the goal of providing top tier education to anyone with access to a computer and the internet. The video below describes this quite well:
For the last several years I have used Khan Academy to help give my students a tool to use to improve in math. Many students come to my class lacking skills or lacking knowledge. Often students lack the ability or motivation to attempt to repair their gaps in math knowledge. Khan Academy allows them to do this without really being aware and gives teachers great insight into students’ progress and ability.
Like the Khan Academy, there are other tools I want to explore. Many students want to get better at math, but have no means to do so. If students wish to get better at math, my goal is to provide them with tools to help them reach their goal. The tools listed below provide students with math specific help.
Student-based Open education tools:
· Khan Academy
· CK-12
· MIT Open Course ware
· Learnzillion
· Edmodo
· Schoology
· School of Open
Many of the student tools are powerful for teachers. For instance, Learnzillion has a Common Core roadmap to help guide teachers and provide a cohesive series of lessons. I plan to use these tools to help me make the transition to the Common Core as well as a standards based grading system. Furthermore, we have three new math teachers in my building and I will share these tools with them in order to help make their first year as easy as possible.
Teacher-based Open Education Tools:
· OER Commons
· Mastery Connect
· Edmodo
· Schoology
· Learnzillion
Both lists of tools include Edmodo and Schoology, which are social networking type of tools. Teachers and students use these sites to build a community of sharing, collaboration, creation and instruction. Students are able to view all sorts of information from calendars to assignments to discussions. Educators can post virtually any content to these communities for students to work with.
Additionally, teachers can engage colleagues in professional development and provide useful tools and feedback to one another. The ability to collaborate with other teachers is a powerful aspect of these educational/social web sites and I plan to engage with these resources.
There are a few drawbacks and hurdles to using such tools. Students tend to treat social media like a playground. Teachers need to provide very clear expectations and guidelines for appropriate use of these tools. Issue of bullying and inappropriate discussions are going to come up and need to be dealt with swiftly. Teachers will also need to reteach expectations and model good online citizenship behavior regularly.
I look forward to learning more and growing as an educator and hope to use this plan to do so. This coming school year, I will recieve a class set of iPads. These new tools will present great challenges and great opportunity. It is my hope that I will be able to apply principals of the Creative Commons and Open Education not only with the use of new classroom technology, but to all aspects of my teaching.
Like the Khan Academy, there are other tools I want to explore. Many students want to get better at math, but have no means to do so. If students wish to get better at math, my goal is to provide them with tools to help them reach their goal. The tools listed below provide students with math specific help.
Student-based Open education tools:
· Khan Academy
· CK-12
· MIT Open Course ware
· Learnzillion
· Edmodo
· Schoology
· School of Open
Many of the student tools are powerful for teachers. For instance, Learnzillion has a Common Core roadmap to help guide teachers and provide a cohesive series of lessons. I plan to use these tools to help me make the transition to the Common Core as well as a standards based grading system. Furthermore, we have three new math teachers in my building and I will share these tools with them in order to help make their first year as easy as possible.
Teacher-based Open Education Tools:
· OER Commons
· Mastery Connect
· Edmodo
· Schoology
· Learnzillion
Both lists of tools include Edmodo and Schoology, which are social networking type of tools. Teachers and students use these sites to build a community of sharing, collaboration, creation and instruction. Students are able to view all sorts of information from calendars to assignments to discussions. Educators can post virtually any content to these communities for students to work with.
Additionally, teachers can engage colleagues in professional development and provide useful tools and feedback to one another. The ability to collaborate with other teachers is a powerful aspect of these educational/social web sites and I plan to engage with these resources.
There are a few drawbacks and hurdles to using such tools. Students tend to treat social media like a playground. Teachers need to provide very clear expectations and guidelines for appropriate use of these tools. Issue of bullying and inappropriate discussions are going to come up and need to be dealt with swiftly. Teachers will also need to reteach expectations and model good online citizenship behavior regularly.
I look forward to learning more and growing as an educator and hope to use this plan to do so. This coming school year, I will recieve a class set of iPads. These new tools will present great challenges and great opportunity. It is my hope that I will be able to apply principals of the Creative Commons and Open Education not only with the use of new classroom technology, but to all aspects of my teaching.