Reading Reflection

While reading chapter 27, reflect on what you perceive to be your own areas of strength and what competencies you feel you need to work hardest to develop given your professional goals. State and describe at least three competencies you’d like to develop and why. I do understand that most of you are school teachers, not ID&T professionals, but certainly there is plenty overlap between these different types of roles.

When asked to identify strengths I always feel I tend to look at areas that I feel are the most important to develop and may view a personal strength as a weakness. For what ever reason weakness are easy to identify.

Two of my strengths inside of the teaching profession are:

• Seek and acknowledge the contributions of others.
• Aid and be supportive of colleagues.

As a benefit to being a one person department I have the opportunity to interact with all of my colleagues when it comes to departmental meetings. I am fortunate enough to be able to sit in on meetings that pertain to my areas of expertise.  For example: All graduating seniors must assemble an electronic high school portfolio. I work with all the 12 grade English teachers to develop the resources the students need to successfully complete the project. As a result of my professional interaction with this project (5th year) we have develop a very positive relationship and have two-way interactions for other lesson planning.

Two professional competencies would like to further develop:

• Update and improve professional knowledge, skills, and attitudes.
• Maintain networks to advocate for and support the training and performance function.

The first bullet is a challenge to stay on top.  I am a high school computer teacher. I feel my responsibility to the students is to teach them the knowledge, skills, and attitudes in my classes that will ensure them success in high school and be applicable after high school. My lessons plans always have to change an update to reflect new technologies. For example: I have for the past 8 years taught spreadsheets using MS Excel. I had what I thought were several well planned units that gave students a real world use for spreadsheets. This year I am rewriting the lessons to use Google Docs and especially the collaboration tools built into cloud computing.

The second bullet again can be a challenge or easily to be over looked in a one man department, however, with the tools that I have experienced in this class I feel I have a greater advantage then my peers with multiple person departments. The online tools I feel that have supported my knowledge network are diigo.com. The social bookmarking site and more has allowed me to join groups of educators and have relevant bookmarks, with highlights, and notes delivered to my email box once a week. The second tool is the set up of the blog. Those of you that have seen my blog it looks more like a notebook or scrapbook of ideas. Most of the post are generated automatically from diigo.com.  I use this at school as a tool to build lessons and resources. I also share the snippets of my blog with my colleagues. Not the entire blog it would drive them nuts.

Finally, I feel it is import to develop multiple online skills and competencies. The skills may not fall directly under the categories of technology but are critical to be a knowledgeable user computer technology. My network with my colleagues and online tools I am in the process of learning how to create better forms of online discussion and create time for learner self reflection.

Table 27.3 page 275

Competencies

• Update and improve professional knowledge, skills, and attitudes
• Maintain networks to advocate for and support the training and performance function
• Select, modify, or create a design and development model appropriate for a given project.
• Apply basic research skills to design projects

• Analyze the characteristics of existing and emerging technologies and their use in an instructional environment
• Evaluate and assess instruction and its impact
• Develop instructional materials

• Manage environment that fosters learning and performance
• Design instruction that reflects an understanding of diversity of learners and groups of learners
• Communicate effectively
• Communicate in written, oral, and visual forms.

Skills and Competencies with associated online instruction

• Allow learners time for self reflections
• Archive and organize discussion to be used in subsequent lessons
• Sense how the online text messages may appear to distance learners

Code of Ethics

• Seek and acknowledge the contributions of others
• Aid and be supportive of colleagues
• Represent the education and training community in a positive way.