Professional Development in Technology Integration

For a technology integrator, I followed Vicki Davis, a social studies teacher who has found new and unique ways to incorporate technology into her classroom. She has written more than one book and runs a blog to help other teachers with teaching tips and technology tips. She writes her blog entries to help inform teachers and share ideas thought up by her and other teachers, she uses her blog to connect ideas with the classroom and help you with technology integration.

In her 7 Key Ingredients in the successful 21st Century Classroom, she discusses how to bring technology into your class in ways that you might not have thought up before. In this blog post, she links to the website Trello, which she describes as an organization website where students can vote for things and allows for more classroom interaction. One thing I really liked that she said in this post is how she's used Tumblr, Twitter and Pintrest to teach lessons, and that's something that I want to do in my classroom. She talks about how, because so many schools are moving towards being a STEM  school, that even history and english classes are going to have to start incorporating technology into their classrooms.

She also has plenty of non technology posts, one called Stay Positive, which gives you tips on how to cancel negativity in your classroom and create a more positive environment. Such as being upfront about the idea and listen to the problems that are being had and try and move towards a more positive solution, or just "renew" your mind and try and look at the situation in a new light to see a different side or just look at the situation with a fresh set of eyes. She has a lot of blog posts like these, with tips on how to stay motivated (she recommends music, being productive in the morning and end the school year well) and time management tips, like creating a calendar.

When it comes to actually using new technology in the classroom, Vicki Davis tries to find unique ways to use technology that kids might already be familiar with in her classroom. The biggest example being Pintrest, she has more than one blog post about why and how we should use Pintrest in the classroom, including Tips on How to use Pintrest (follow different boards, how to make private and group boards and organizing your pins), Pintrest for Beginners, which teaches you on how to make a Pintrest account and even has some further links to her own boards so you can get  feel for how to use Pintrest, including her education boards, which can be informational for anyone trying to use Pinrest in the classroom. She also has a blog post that is all about Pintrest in classroom, which talks about cool and unique ways to incorporate Pintrest into your classroom, like following education boards, having students make Pintrest boards for an assignment or using a Pintrest board to collect student work to be viewed by a larger community.

After looking through her blog, Vicki Davis has a lot of ideas on how to use unique technology in the classroom, and I definitely will be looking back on her Pintrest posts when I want a new and unique assignment that involves technology and motivates students to be creative, which seems to be what she strives for.

Individual Response to Team Discussion and Assessment

1. What are two things you would do differently if your team had the opportunity to give your presentation again?

2. What did you learn about yourself as a teacher through this process (from planning to implementation through self assessment)?

That, no matter how prepared you are, and how much you plan out exactly what you're going to down the minute, that anything can happen and you have to prepare yourself for anything to happen. The discussions during our presentation took a lot longer than we had originally planned, leaving us with needing to shorten other things to fit it into the time slot. So, you can plan everything you need to do and prepare every document and presentation and still not be 100% ready, because really anything can take longer or shorter, or go completely differently than you planned. 

3. What are three (or more) teaching concepts that you learned through this that you hope to use in your future teaching?

This was my first real time using team teaching, and that's something that I really want to use in my future classroom. I love the idea or working with other teachers and combining subjects so that kids can have an enriching lesson about more than one subject. I also learned about managing classroom discussions. I've never had to manage a classroom discussion before, and I want to have a really deep discussion classroom so, being able to facilitate one was really useful to what I want to do in my classroom in the future. Collaborative preparation was also something that I think was really useful and really fun to do to, everyone in my group had their own ideas and brought something new to the table and those discussions were part of my favorite process of this whole presentation.