I was very glad to learn that my class was about professional development, especially after I had signed up at my school to be on the Professional Development Key Team this year. The staff that I work with on this committee are great! They are a diverse group with lots of ideas and opinions, but are also willing to work together to formulate a plan. During our first meeting, we worked on determining what kinds of training we thought the staff needed, based on our SIP goals: Math, Writing, and Technology. The committee decided to send out a survey (which just so happened to be one of the first assignments that I had for this grad course) that would determine where staff members viewed their standing in these focus areas.
At the next Professional Learning Key Team meeting, the committee decided the topics of the sessions we would use for the upcoming professional learning afternoon and discussed with some of the teacher leaders at school who were willing to lead/teach the sessions. There would be two different topics addressed on that day with each topic would have a differentiated session. Teachers signed up for their area of interest and level of training needed (i.e. Technology Integration: Beginning Integration or Intermediate/Advanced).
Having this class allowed me the responsibility to conduct a survey using Google Docs that was awesome! It was so easy to gather the data, and I loved the survey results in the pie charts that made great visuals to present to my administrators and my committee.
I was also given the opportunity to plan and carry out a professional development session from start to finish. I believe that some of the assignments from this course like the agenda, evaluation, and overview of our current reality helped me see the big picture of how professional development courses can be used to better the teaching and learning of our staff. I think this class also allowed me to develop a framework that I was able to carry out during the session I taught and will be able to use again in future professional development opportunities.
Areas of improvement for the course would be:
1. More direction given in class that provided a better understanding and example of what was expected for the overall project/presentation. I do not feel that class time was spent properly in preparing us for the end product of the class. Classes dealt more with research into different professional development scenarios and responses to questions pertaining to those sessions that could have been used as at-home assignments (rather than study guides) while using class time to devote to things that directly related to our own professional development assignment.
2. If the use of a certain type of technology is needed to achieve the maximum amount of points in the end product, then that technology should be taught in the class. The overarching professor stated that in order to achieve the maximum amount of points in the course, we would have to use a Prezi for our presentation, however Prezi was never taught in the class. Since this is a technology course, I believe it would have been beneficial to actually teach this application. I think that I might have had a better Prezi if I had been shown what it was capable of, but instead, mine turned out very simple. I would have also liked to have been given examples of other ways to use Prezi in my classroom.
