The main purpose of this blog is to fill my Educ 504 Teaching with Technology requirement. However, I have been interested in the idea of blogging ever since my Dad told me I should start one about two years ago. This class has finally "jump-started" my blogging career. (Sorry Dad!)


Monday, July 23, 2012

You Can Trust Me - I'm a Professional

Well, at least I will be a certified professional as of August 2013!  As for right now, I'm still in teacher prep school and "learning the ropes" of this collaborative new world of technology and teaching.  Unbeknownst to these "Rope Masters" I am a quick study!

In our last class meeting we created our own electronic professional profile!  Well, not quite since most of us haven't really completed anything "professional" as of yet, so we have really only began our e-portfolio's.  By learning how to navigate through weebly.com, we laid down a concrete foundation and framework.  The work we complete throughout the year will continue to fill the open spaces, evolving and shifting the overall product that is our professional portfolio.  (At first I was going to say "resumé" but "portfolio" just sounds so much more... well, professional!)

I was surprised by Weebly!  The format was extremely user-friendly in design choices and overall layout, allowing more time to be spent on the actual content!  Or more time allocated to creating pages of multimedia additions such as a link to this blog and a sweet slideshow of my pictures!  Very cool.  The benefits of such an amazing online resource are pretty obvious, but in my opinion, I love the fact that I will be getting my name out in the professional world of teachers, as well as keeping my documents, and other such "records of practice," easily accessible to potential employers in the (hopefully near) future.


  Hire me!

And back to being serious...

I've noticed an emerging theme from courses, professors, and our mentors at Scarlett: time is precious, yet limited in the teaching profession.  Even our guest speaker last Friday mentioned how he had to weigh the pros and cons of his Angry Birds math project.  He mentioned that there was always a tradeoff in teaching.  For him, allocating more time towards playing the Angry Birds game in class, (since every student may not have had the resources), was more valuable than spending that time drawing graphs of polar equations.  Students who did not normally participate in class were more involved in the Angry Birds math project.

Another problem the guest speaker mentioned was finding the time to stay on top of his content knowledge.  As teachers we should always be improving our craft and become fluent in new technology, teaching strategies, and/or recent studies with illuminating results.  And then there's school responsibilities such as lunch meetings, parent conferences, study hours, etc.  One way our guest speaker was able to fulfill his responsibilities as a professional teacher was by using Twitter's recent innovation: Tweetdeck.  Tweetdeck is awesome.  It lets you organize your twitter feeds based on your preferences.  A useful tool for teachers looking for an efficient way to stay up-to-date on current subject content/knowledge, without sacrificing their time!  As a teacher time is limited.  Twitter/Tweetdeck can be used to help mitigate this problem of not having enough time and the need to find resources or interesting developments in the education field.

5 comments:

  1. I think we could have used any other website builder/hosting site for our portfolio projects, but Weebly was super easy to use. I'm probably going to use it when I start applying for jobs just by putting the URL on my resume. The Tweetdeck business was a little over my head...I sort of tuned out during that part of the presentation because, well, I don't have a Twitter. There are so many different social networking sites and communication tools out there that I don't know what to use. What are the benefits of using Twitter?

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  2. @Asha - Yup, you could use any website builder for your portfolio. I just like Weebly because it's super-easy and very aesthetically pleasing!

    @Michelle - First, thanks for your perseverence after class today! And secondly, if you like Tweetdeck.com, check out Hootsuite.com -- I like that even more (especially the iPad app)!

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  3. I loved Tweetdeck, too! The only problem is that I don't have a Twitter...and I don't really want one. I guess I just thought Twitter was only good if you wanted to know what Kim and Kanye have been up to or what your BFFs ate for lunch, but Mr. Ward made a very compelling case. I was also talking with another MACer about being able to save tweets from Tweetdeck to Diigo. I do think I will use Diigo in the future and being able to combine the two could be very useful. I guess we'll see how long it takes me to give in.

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  4. I agree that Weebly was easy to use. They really want to people to use their site, and they should, it's a simple tool. However, I've never been a huge fan of putting myself out there for critiquing online. What if someone sees my Weebly and immediately decides they don't like me without even meeting me? I do think Tweetdeck is pretty sweet idea. I myself have a Twitter, but was unaware I could further tailor my feed.

    Doing things like the Angry Birds exercise is risky. It may be hard to keep your students in line while just one or two them are playing a video game. Activities like that don't work quite as well in Latin classrooms.

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  5. My impressions of weebly: meh. Not that it isn't useful or user-friendly, it's just... I don't know, plain. I think I'd rather find another service that allows a little more customization. I know that's not for everyone. I've programmed web pages before. I know a little CSS and am learning Python. (computer programming languages... I'm a nerd) I know that any tech-savvy-ness sets us apart from the bulk of teacher candidates out there but, I think we need to find even more ways to make ourselves stand out and a customized web-based portfolio will help do that. Of course, a fancy web-portfolio won't help you if the content is crappy. We got to have some chops and know what we're talking about to get that first job and keep it. I guess my attitude stems from, and Asha can back me up on this, having to audition all these years. As an actor you're looking for any way to make yourself stand out from the literally hundreds of other actors vying for the same gig. The teaching market is looking more and more like the acting market. Take a page from our book and set yourself apart.

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