Professional Growth Plan with Goals

Goal: To improve the assessment practices I engage in within my classroom when designing larger projects/unit studies

Specific Objectives to Track Progress

· Design assessment in a way that allows for adaptation—for example well written rubrics can be effectively applied to a diverse array final products. I will explore a few units which are shared in the IO community to find examples of such rubrics.
· Design assessment as an ongoing element in class work. This means I will have already thought/designed an assessment strategy before unit/project/assignment design is finished and implement it as the project develops. I will ensure that there is a space for myself, students, and their peers to engage in multiple feedback loops.
· When creating/modifying these larger projects, design with the end in mind. I will find exemplars from experts in the field to provide students with in order to clearly define expectations and raise the bar for their own work.
· Define the key learnings (perhaps by designing a rough rubric) as a first step. Over the summer, I will define these for the first two units in the Physics 20 and Science 10 curriculum.

Goal: To continue improving my inquiry design skills

Specific Objectives to Track Progress

· I need to become more self confident in the design of these projects. This means, I need to concentrate less on covering the curriculum, and more on presenting students with the essential elements for understanding (which in the end WILL address entire chunks of the curriculum IF designed carefully). I will achieve this by finding a few (to start with!) authentic examples of where the work they conduct in the classroom connects to the real world.
· I will improve my abilities with practice, and by providing myself (just as I would with my students) of exemplars to strive towards. I will keep a clear picture of what authentic, intentional and directed inquiry looks like by consulting exemplars in IO.
· After exploring current work scientists are completing in the field, and after consulting my “text-book” (projects published in the IO community) I will lay out a rough design/modify an existing IO project for ONE inquiry unit study in Physics 20 over the summer.

Goal: To focus on individual learning needs in order to improve my ability to differentiate lessons and assignments.

Specific Objectives to Track Progress

· I need to be aware of the tools and supports available to me that can help me support the diverse group of students I will meet next fall. I will explore my school’s resources as well as policies and procedures regarding accommodation of students.
· By becoming familiar with many teaching strategies and the learning supports which are commonly used in schools, I will improve my own ability to recognize and address individual needs. I will also look into the publications from Alberta Ed, which were recommended by Evelyn Hickey over the summer.
· In the one rough unit plan that I will create, I will initially include at least 3 different ways students can “show what they know”. This list will no doubt grow when I actually introduce students to unit study, but will be a good start and help me begin to hone my abilities to support multiple paths of learning.

Goal: To remain healthy and enthusiastic during my first year of teaching

Specific Objectives to Track Progress

· I will strive to foster healthy and supportive relationships with other members of staff and administration at school. I will take advantage of the mentorship program in place, and find an individual I feel comfortable to approach to ask for support or assistance.
· I will do at least one thing each day for myself. On busy days, this could simply be a few minutes of quiet time.
· I will keep in touch with the positive supportive peers I met in this program. Having these people around me will help ensure I keep a positive outlook in stressful situations. They will also be a huge source of support and understanding when I am struggling.

Independent Inquiry Self-Assessment

When I began this inquiry, I had the impression that I would complete a finished product which would provide me with strategies to accommodate gifted and talented learners. I do feel that I achieved this learning goal; however after the conclusion of this inquiry, I have gained much more than just these strategies. Throughout the semester, I have collected articles, books, journals, and have spoken to professionals about who gifted and talented students are, and what they need. The weekly SIPS seminar also directed my inquiry by providing valuable insights and resources. Through this process, I did not solely study gifted and talented learners, but I also gained valuable insight into learning in general.

Through writing this paper, my own understanding of what personalized learning entails has greatly increased. I now have a better understanding and appreciation for the once very confusing concept of differentiation. I have come to realize that it is much more important to teach in responsive way to the individual rather than concentrating on the label of gifted.
I have also begun to understand the importance of authenticity in my own design. I need to create authentic projects, which encourage and allow a space for student voice. The role of technology becomes one which is inextricably linked to other disciplines when these authentic tasks are carried out. An example I expressed in my paper included the use of Skype to help direct inquiry in a classroom, to provide students with the input of professionals from around the world.

In addition, I also clearly defined the phenomenon of gifted and talented learners by consulting various resources and experts at the University and also in the field. Through the semester, I added new understandings to each draft of inquiry as I explored new resources. I critically evaluated important issues surrounding my chosen phenomenon by exploring current practices being used in the field of gifted and talented education. I also critiqued these practices, by evaluating how they supported common struggles gifted and talented learners face. I have already begun utilizing the insight and information I collected throughout my inquiry this semester to help me better support learners as I tutor them. I can already see where these new understandings can help me in my teaching practice.

I enjoyed writing this inquiry, because it is a topic which interests me and I feel is important. I know I will utilize the things I learned from this inquiry to improve my practice in the classroom—and therefore the inquiry was authentic for me as a learner. Concluding this semester, and this inquiry, I have learned extremely valuable things and grown because of them. I realize that any assignment I ask my students to complete must also be important, interesting and authentic to them, (just as this individual inquiry was to me) because these things are what truly define what meaningful learning is to ANY student.

Student Inquiry Project Self Assessment

1. How did completing this integrated study help you think in greater depth about planning for effective technology integration in a core subject? In planning this project, and completing a " curriculum mind map", it was essential for me to become familiar with many different POS` in addition to Science, including the ICT, Fine Arts, and ELA. After reading through each of them, I began to make some connections between the respective curricula. After further investigation, many more links became apparent. I think that physically mapping out these links helped me to realize how inter-connected they all were. In my next inquiry design, the background knowledge (especially of the ICT POS) I have gained through this assignment will help me to be even more intentional in my design, and include even more meaningful integration of different disciplines.

2. How did you ensure that technology was an integral part of the study and not just an add-on or an electronic way of doing exactly what could be done without technology at all? I think that the final culminating web page for Parks Canada strongly linked technology into our project, and I believe that students could not complete the study without meaningful experiences with technology. Our group talked about the Inquiry Rubric as we designed our project. We really concentrated on the Authenticity aspect and intentionally designed the project so that ``The inquiry study originates with an issue, problem, question or exploration that provides opportunities to create or produce something that contributes to the worlds knowledge``. The intent behind having the students create a web page was to ensure that they would have a medium to share their information with others beyond just the classroom, and truly contribute to the larger communities knowledge of their chosen ecosystem and the issues surrounding it.

3. How did completing this integrated study help you meet additional personal/professional goals for the seminar? One of my main goals for this seminar was to understand what inquiry actually was, and how I could effectively implement it in my classroom. Through the completion of the various IO challenges I began to understand what inquiry was, and more importantly what it wasn’t. After these challenges, getting to actually create a unit plan helped solidify my own understanding of inquiry and technology. My ability to create what I feel is a successful inquiry project, has help increased my self-confidence because I know I CAN design meaningful projects for my students.

4. What are you learning about the possibilities and pitfalls of planning with others as you learn new things? I had a very positive experience when collaborating with my group. This may be due to the fact that we are all like minded with previous education in the Sciences. In the future, I hope to work with others who possess different strengths and interests—I think this will ensure great cross-curricular opportunities, and perhaps will also introduce new struggles! I have recently been invited into many of my peers IO projects, which I think is awesome. The MT program, and especially this class has continually reinforced the importance of collaboration in teaching. I think collaboration and peer review challenge me to see multiple perspectives, and view learning in new and different ways.

5. In what ways might you use this integrated study with your own student next year if the opportunity arose? I feel that this study introduced important ideas and issues that could be addressed from K-12, as well as even perhaps in higher education. The “big idea” of “What happens when nature fights back” is what allows for the diverse use of this unit, as I feel it could touch on many different curricula. I also realize however (and it was suggested in our peer review) that we need to break this unit into smaller chunks, as it is so broad. If I do not use this specific unit next year, I know I will continually use and build on the understanding of designing inquiry—if not the actual inquiry project itself.

Student Showcase

Last Friday, my group and I presented our student showcase. In attempt to foster some meaningful discussion with the class, we tried to concentrate on how we might use technologies in the classroom, rather than explaining how to physically navigate through them. I think this approach was important, as we know, our students don't need direction on how the technology works, but rather they need guidance to ensure deep engagement with the material (which is caused by our carefully designed intentional learning experiences).



Skype

First, a big thank you to Seanna and her lovely friend in Korea, who had been up about 20 hours when we spoke with her over skype (AND she was impressively still coherent!) I think having skype in the classroom, provides a new, incredible learning experience. I found dozens of youtube videos which showcased students gathered around a computer and webcam, as they listened to experts (scientists, authors, politicians) in real time. This tool really lets us show our students that what they are learning, are things that are really going on in the real world. They issues and ideas they are grappling with, are the issue and ideas these adults face everyday. It allows them to see the "big picture" and feel that there education matters and is more than questions on an exam at the end of the year, it is also part of these experts life work!



I also have to thank our class, who shared many insights on how we could use this technology or how they have seen it used in their school. Before this presentation, I knew the basics about skype-- but because many of our classmates use the technology regularly, they had other information/pointers/cool features of the technology to share with us. I thought the virtual white board was terrific, and had no idea it existed (thanks Chad!) Thanks to everyone else who shared their knowledge with the class.



Voxopop

This was a technology that was shared by a teacher at the school Sarah and I were placed at last semester. It allows users to record their voices in different discussion groups-- which you can make private and require an invitation to join. It is also not blocked by CBE (as of yet) so many of you really could use it in your classrooms next year.It is similar to some other technologies, (as was mentioned by our fellow classmate) such as voice thread , which also allows users to post video and documents and their own commentary accompanying them. Awesome!

I think this tool is great for many reasons; such as ESL learners practicing the English language, student self assessment, and an interviewing tool. As was mentioned by one of our classmates,it is also a great tool if your school does not have macs or garage band software available.


Wall Wisher

This is the last piece we left the class with. It is kind of similar to delicious which Neil Stevenson introduced to us during his talk. Delicious allows users to create a "portable" bookmark of websites/URLs so others who are given the delicious link can have access to the list of sites. I think Wall wisher is a little easier to use, and Sarah set up our page so that she wouldn't have to approve the posts before they were revealed. Wall Wisher is also great, because students can identify themselves as anonymous. This would be great for example, if in the classroom we were asking difficult questions where identifying yourself may effect how you answer. The only downside is that you can't make you pages private. However you can adjust your user settings so the creator of the page must approve all comments before they appear.

Check out our SIPS Wall Wisher

This was also the artefact that we provided with our class. It was really a great way to gauge how the class felt the presentation went, and also a space for them to post other technologies they thought were similar/useful/interesting.

I learned a lot about the technologies through using them prior to our presentation, and really appreciated all the comments and ideas we received from the class as we discussed last Friday.
Thanks for your participation, and thanks to my group for a successful showcase!

Great Task- Self Assessment

Great Task: Light's, Camera, Action!

The great task that we chose, was an ELA assignment for grade 10. The topic, of English Language Arts was quite out of my comfort zone (as a secondary Science specialist) but actually turned out really well in the end. We chose a task which required students to pick a novel which has not yet been turned into a movie, and design a movie poster.

Self Assessment

1. In our great task, we chose to use gimp, which is an image manipulation software. I however must admit that the other group members did most of the exploring with this program. Where I felt I gained experience with technology was through the creation of a website credibility rubric. Through creation of this rubric, I gained some insight into guiding students through a process to find useful/reliable resources (technology literacy). I worked with the idea of a website rubric that was first introduced by Neil Stevenson in his talk to our class. I created a credibility rubric, which I then rated some of the websites we were looking at. It's amazing how confusing I found MY OWN rubric to me! I made a lot of changes, after my own attempts at using it, to make it more user friendly (and less confusing!).

2. I took a look at my first blog to see the specific goals I had set out, one goal I made was:

" ... [I] want to know how to incorporate new resources into the classroom which will in turn help students become active, critical thinkers who are involved in meaningful learning activities. (i.e. I want them to remember and use the stuff they learn!)"

I feel that the completion of this activity did require students to engage in meaningful work. It wasn't just simply playing around with the gimp software (although this was needed to familiarize yourself with the technology). They needed a plan first. They needed to first read a novel, where they would develop their own interpretations of the themes in the book, and begin to brainstorm images to represent these themes. This was not just simply an exercise to learn how to use a new software, but this assignment had ties to the curriculum and the discipline.
Use of the website credibility rubric required them to think critically about what they were reading. This assignment required the students to communicate learning that they constructed themselves, around a specific novel. This task was one which allowed students personal experiences with the novel and the characters to be expressed. This expression of personal interpretation, is what I think students will remember about this assignment (and remembering what they learned was one of my goals!).

3. In order to create a meaningful role for technology in learning, we first need to understand what it is we want students to learn! We need to define this understanding, and design the assignment to help them understand what really matters. The assignment needs to be meaningful and strongly tied to the discipline, no matter what technology we are using. The use of gimp software for example, is only meaningful after the students understand the important themes from their novel, and how to express them. Otherwise, it is simply a collage of meaningless graphics.

What I have learned about using technology for effective collaboration from this great task? This is a little hard for me to answer. I think this project is lacking around using technology for collaboration. The students could have shared files associated with the gimp software as they were constructing them, but other than this, most of the collaboration would have taken place in the planning stages. We could improve this task, by requiring students to collectively plan and discuss the important aspect of their groups chosen novel. We could also give them an online medium to do so-- such as google docs. In retrospect, we could have had them create thought webs in a program such as SMARTideas, and then post these files onto google docs.

4. This task, was again out of my comfort zone. This caused me some frustration, however, I really enjoyed the book we read, and enjoyed talking about it with my group members. I am also not at all proficient with using the gimp software, but thankfully, my other group members took the lead on that part. I was also frustrated when I was completing the website credibility rubric, for many reasons, one because it was confusing, and two, because the only person I had to blame for the confusion was myself (as I had created the rubric). Having the other group members use the rubric helped, and using it myself helped me make valuable adjustments.

5. To improve my contributions to my group, I could have been more involved in the actual construction of the poster using gimp. I didn't offer much help or collaboration to the use of the software, as other group members took the reigns and were doing a great job.

I think some strengths that I possessed were my efforts to collaborate with my group members in all other areas. Together we created what I feel to be an effective rubric, which took a few revisions and had input from all three of us.

Interpretive summary of data / feedback from peer review

Our peers had some great insight for us, and good suggestions that we will implement to improve the quality of our task. Some specific things that were mentioned included:

• Put supporting documents online, rather than having only hard copies. This would improve organization of our task.
• Questions were raised surrounding how we would evaluate "students understanding of technology" which was included in our rubric. This requires us to rethink the wording, and revise the rubric.
• It was also suggested that perhaps the students should be required to choose from a list of novels. These would be chosen from the teacher (i.e. the educator would have to be very familiar with each of the books, in order to mark the assignment).
• We were also encouraged to use a wider range of resources, as we utilized mainly getty images for our poster (however we used this website because only pictures which have been released by the owner/photographer are posted on here)
• The idea of showing the steps as we go along was also suggested, things like "thumbnail sketches, exploration in designs, class critique".

I really appreciated all of the feedback that we received. Some of the above things will truly help the assignment to be more directed and meaningful, and were things that I really didn't think about. I think this activity has also revealed how useful peer review is. As we have been told many times, authentic assessment requires feedback loops. This is one "loop"- our peers giving us suggestions, and the opportunity to change things before we officially hand in our great tasks. This idea of peer review is one that I will utilize in my classroom as I see (and have just experienced) so may benefits for learning.

So much information, but how do I effectively use it?!

This semester, we have already been introduced to many different technologies through our Student Showcases. In our weekly seminars, our peers have introduced us to many different web based resources and software. Each week, I have challenged myself to understand how each of these technologies could be used in my future classroom. Some were easier to "fit in" than others. Here is what I have come up with...


Google docs

I really appreciate this tool, and I myself have started using it a lot! It is very handy, as I can access all my files from any computer. Not having to email myself documents so I can access them from places other than home, is one less thing to remember!

It was mentioned in class, that some students used google docs to do all of their lesson planning last semester. I can see the value of this, as I myself fell victim to a malfunctioning memory stick a few times. I wish I would have know about google docs a few months ago.


The big question thought, how can I use google docs to enhance learning in my classroom.
Having a science background, I can see this tool being used for any collaborative process, such as lab write ups. Having this online collaboration space is so helpful, as often students will have to collaborate and produce one final copy of a lab writeup. If I can figure out a way to track the history of editing on google docs, I could ensure that each student was participating in the write up. (Does anyone know how to track this??)



Xtranormal.com

This tool was extremely entertaining. Perhaps too entertaining... I think I was concentrating more on all the different expressions and arm movements I could make my character do, rather than how I could use it in the classroom.
However, perhaps it could be used as a way for students to communicate their self assessments?



Showing Evidence Tool

This tool seemed more complicated, and I think I would have to play around with it before I utilized it in a classroom. I think it would be a great tool to help students organize evidence before a debate.



SMART technology (an introduction to smartboards)

The good old smartboard. This thing is an amazing tool...I hope I have one in my future classroom because I really did love using it in my practicum last semester. I have barely scratched the surface of what smartboards can do, not to mention the new technology that is constantly being produced. With the smartboard, I was able to organize my lessons easily (using notebook software) and the transition from powerpoint to a website or movie was smooth (Press a button on the screen, no fiddling around on the computer). As long as there were no technical difficulties of course. I was also lucky enough to have a projector which was wall mounted, so we bypassed the problem of re-orienting the non-permanent projector (I could see how that may drive one crazy, and be reason enough to use the smartboard less).



Comic life

I myself have fought the valiant battle with comic life in the classroom. In a junior high science classroom, the girls were more interested in photo shoots using the web cams, than expressing what they had learned about heat and temperature. I think the main thing they learned from the assignment my partner teacher and I gave them, was how their hair looked. This being said, I realize that the assignment was not encouraging students to interact more deeply with the content. As Michele commented on my last post, students will become distracted if the assignment is "...weak or surface work -- when the task is challenging, meaningful and tied strongly to the discipline, AND teachers support learning through strong instructional and assessment practices, then students engage deeply and in appropriate ways with the task and technology".

Although comic life may have won the last battle, I am determined to win the war...

These are some of my own experiences with technologies, and some of my ideas around how I could use them in my classroom. I can't wait to learn more about the plethora of tools that are out there!

Beginning my inquiry into technology...

image taken from: http://www.warwwestss.eq.edu.au/Webquests/Journalist_files/comic.bmp

Can I just say, I feel pretty good about technology right now, this blog came together quite easily!

This first assignment requires us to reflect on our strengths and needs with regard to inquiry and ICT. I have utilized technology in a junior high classroom, and the students positive responses are what have inspired me to learn more.

I am also beginning to appreciate (like the above illustration implies) the exponential rate of change in the world, and the effect this has, and will have on youth. This complex, changing world is what I will be preparing students for, so I myself must embrace the change! I am eager and excited to learn more about what/where/when and how to implement technology successfully in my classroom. I want to know how to incorporate new resources into the classroom which will in turn help students become active, critical thinkers who are involved in meaningful learning activities. (i.e. I want them to remember and use the stuff they learn!)

I have had some exposure to SMART technology; notebook, SMARTideas, senteo clickers.

I have become familiar with the D2L (Desire to learn) webased platform

I have also utilized web resources such as BrainPop, PHET, edquest, jeopardylabs, and TedTalks in my lessons this past semester (thanks to a lot of help from my partner teacher!)

I am also very interested in deciphering circumstances where technology can become a distraction rather than a tool to enhance learning-- and how to avoid these situations.

Good luck to all of us this semester, I think it will be exciting, interesting and informative!