Learning Blog ISDT 5369

 Based on the personalized professional learning survey, the district I am working with scores low to average in collaborative leadership, personalized student learning, robust infrastructure, and personalized professional learning. This may be due to focus on other fundamental needs the district, administrators, and teachers feel are more pressing. Nonetheless, recognition of the importance of these elements seems vital to moving the district forward, whether or not they are achievable in the immediate future. My own leadership style is developing in at least one important way. I am communicating with the teacher I am working with in a way that draws out their own strengths and knowledge as an experienced teacher toward implementing student-centered learning. For example, I am interested in developing a training package in which the teachers are themselves experiencing the technology as a student and emphasizing a personalized plan of action based on how they view the benefits of ...

As I continue to develop relationships during my practicum and learn the importance of such relationships as a technology facilitator, I consider the following questions: How am I developing my identity as a technology facilitator?   Perhaps the most important way that I am beginning to develop my professional profile as a technology facilitator is through listening. In my interactions with people in the district, I am spending most of our meeting time together listening. I am interested in what they are actually doing in their day-to-day jobs, what values and beliefs they hold about their educational environment and education in general, what ideas they have about how to make it better and what challenges they face. I am learning about who they are, how they envision their role, and what aspects of what they are doing I would like to emulate in my own approach. In doing so, I am beginning to form ideas about how I can contribute and how I can help them. They are hopefully perceivi...

  What an innovator is To be an innovator in education is to consider what your students need and to be fearless about changing what or how you are teaching to meet those needs. Since we do not always know what students will need in the future, we can foster critical thinking skills and creativity so that our students will be able to adapt to future needs. Being innovative means making existing approaches and lesson plans better by refining them toward developing future-ready skills or exploring new approaches and plans that solve existing problems or fulfill emerging needs in a new way (creativity). Innovation is a way of thinking and approaching what you are doing. I have experienced the need for innovation in my own teaching, but have not yet fully realized it. The pedagogical approaches and skills that I learned, and that my teachers learned before me, no longer reflect the realities of what students need to know how to do. They learn concepts that I think are important, but th...