Thinking EdTech: Developing Young Professionals

Monday, September 22, 2008

Developing Young Professionals

I created a blog roll by adding all of the students' blog addresses to my Google Reader account, sharing their posts, and then publishing my shared items to a web page. I posted the link to this web page on the lab Oncourse home page. I began this week's class by having the students visit the blog roll and read and respond to at least two of their classmates' posts. In the mean time, I was able to pass out the blue and red cups and hand back their lecture worksheets. I have learned all of the students' names, which by having a smaller class was easier than in previous semesters.

After students had enough time for their blog comments, I explained to them why it might be helpful to do such an activity with their own students. I also mentioned that comments are motivating to bloggers, as they show that someone is actually reading their blogs. I then walked the students through the steps of creating their own blog roll through Google Reader to manage blogs that they might be reading. We used blog addresses from classmates as examples in this exercise. After class, I read through some of the comments they had posted, and I think they got the hang of commenting.

In the discussion time, I was surprised to find that most of the students were fuzzy on what the terms professional development and standards meant. I realize that these students are so new to the profession of teaching that they are still learning the jargon that goes with it. We talked about what these terms meant and then went through some of their answers from the lecture worksheets. We also discussed a few key terms from the readings. I then tried out a new technique - think, pair, share - to promote better discussion this week. I posed three questions - one for each row of students. After the students thought about their answers, they talked about their answers with the person sitting next to them. Then, each pair discussed their answer with the whole class. This activity did help in eliciting more discussion, and I think I will try it out again later on in the semester. I plan to try out different such discussion techniques that I learned in a critical thinking/creative thinking/cooperative learning class I took last Spring taught by Dr. Bonk, as this is an area of my teaching that I want to really improve in.

We proceeded to the professional development plan workout. The students had a half hour to work on their drafts. I provided them a variety of web resources to spur their thinking about areas or technologies they might want to learn about and ways that they could learn them. The students worked busily on this, and I am looking forward to reading what they wrote. As students finished, I had them take a look at some of the sample portfolios from MCOATT and Andrew Barrett's W200 example.

We finished out this week's lab session by working on the digital portfolios. We reviewed the information about the portfolios provided in the syllabus, and the students created the basic pages. They uploaded their professional development plans to their artifact pages. I wasn't sure exactly how they should link to their artifacts from this page, but I figured we could move the link later if we need to. I provided the students with the link to Chip Easterling's portfolio FAQ page, and I saw several refer to it in search of answers to their questions. They seemed to appreciate this resource, so thanks, Chip, for the time you invested in putting it together!

I plan to continue working on my discussion time, trying out new techniques to promote conversation and working to come up with questions that require some critical thinking in order to answer. I also am working on learning the features of Google Sites, so that I can be as helpful as I can to the students when we work on the portfolios in class (as well as assist them when they might come to the TTL).

Labels: teaching, W200

posted by SG @ 10:02 PM

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