Showcase Jitters - Summing It All Up

I am very nervous about Saturday's MTT showcase. I have attempted to carefully organize all of the material I want to present, but as we know technology can have its moments of failure. I had so many productions to choose from that it took some time to narrow down my selections. My biggest challenge is I do not like speaking publicly by any means, especially to people I may not know. Although I have gotten better with public speaking it still isn't one of my strong points or anything that I am particularly comfortable with.
I think the showcase is a good idea, because other people in the M.Ed. program and the students beginning the new MTT cohort are always asking what the program is like and what type of assignments are given. I think it would have been a lot easier to complete the assignments if our group would have seen examples of other students' work. I am a very visual person so actually seeing what my end product should look like is extremely helpful, because I am able to process the concepts and then make add my own personality and skills.
This showcase will provide insight to all of the hard work that is required and give students a reference point of what their productions should look like. I had so many productions to choose from that it took some time to narrow down my selections. Despite my nervousness I am excited about sharing my knowledge of technology integration with others. I have everything ready to go. I have made a list of everything that I need to bring and I am loading my car up Friday night, because I have a feeling that if I don't then I will forget something. I went to pick up my poster today and in my opinion it turned out awesome :)

MTT Challenges - Keeping Up With Warp Speed Changes in Technology

One of the largest responsibilities that an MTT will probably possess is keeping up with the trends in technology. Technology is advancing at warp speed. It seems like by the time a new product is released it's already obsolete. I felt really proud about getting a laptop with Windows Vista now there is Windows 7 and I've had my computer less than 1 year. I have just gotten used to using Vista.
Not only is it extremely important for an MTT to keep up with technology trends they also have to be aware of how these trends can be integrated into instruction. The role of an MTT is a continuous process of research, receiving individual training, and providing professional development. Being an MTT is very demanding, because it is necessary that you continuously develop your own technology proficiencies while developing the proficiencies of students and teachers. Developing the proficiencies of teachers may not always be an easy task, because often times some are not very accepting of change.
As a future MTT I understand the importance of staying ahead of the changes in technology and keeping myself equipped with the knowledge of efficient and effective technology instruction. It is very wise to join a professional organization that can keep you current on the latest in the profession. I am strongly considering joining ISTE (International Society of Technology Educators). The cost for membership is pretty steep for a student, but it would be well worth the expense due to the information that is gained through their publications. I'm waiting to get past the holiday expenses before submitting that registration fee :)

Digital Portfolios - Putting It All Together

Creating a digital portfolio is an interesting experience. I am still trying to work out the quirks in my portfolio to get my videos and podcast uploaded. I went through trouble finding a site that would offer enough storage space for free. I found one that allowed 500 MB of storage and when I got ready to upload my last two productions I received an error message stating that I could not upload files larger than 5MB at a time. This is truly frustrating. I'm at the point of pulling my hair out. I guess that is just the trial and error of technology.
Even though I had my obstacles with creating the portfolio, it was truly a culminating experience. I was able to put all of the pieces together that showed my credibility as a teacher. I believe a digital portfolio is a much better presentation of the talents and accomplishments a teacher possess than a paper resume alone. I also think that you should not limit selling yourself with just a digital portfolio, because when I discussed my digital portfolio with veteran educators they stated administrators in their generation may not look at an applicants digital portfolio, because they wouldn't know what to do with it. This further supports my research on offering technology training for adults and changing their perceptions of technology. There are still many people in the education field who really don't understand technology, so when a young tech savvy teacher arrives to an interview with a disc this can end up not working out as planned.
The idea of digital portfolios is phenomenal, because they display an individuals professional growth. Digital portfolios will probably be more popular for teachers in the future. I had not heard of a digital portfolio prior to taking MTT classes and the veteran teachers and administrators that I spoke with had not heard of them either. I hope there is a widespread of awareness about digital portfolios, because they are a powerful tool that can give a much broader picture of what an individual has accomplished.

Blogging

Blogging has been quite a reflective experience for me during the MTT program. I can see how using blogs in the classroom can be an effective tool for students as well as teachers. For older students a class blog with teacher generated discussion threads could be very useful for engaging students in a topic. Having students submit open-ended post could also allow them to be reflective of their learning. I have also seen some blog sites online that offer valuable resources and tips for teachers. Of course I haven't had the opportunity to participate in those blogs just yet, but it is something that I will look into once I have free time again.
Blogging has actually made me think about the topics that I'm discussing and not focusing as much on style and formalities. However, I have to get used to the concept. Prior to beginning the program I barely used email, because finding the time to sit down at the computer is a struggle. I have similar obstacles with blogging. Having a blog site has been a minor challenge to maintain, because I'm still a little prehistoric with digitizing my thoughts. I have to write everything down in my spiral then I upload my post in my blog. The key is finding the time to get it all posted. When I think of good blog topics and even with my mentoring journal I need a hard copy for some reason. I'm having a heart attack at this moment, because I can't find my spiral with all of my blog topics. Hopefully, I will eventually stray away from my outdated format and use the tool as it was intended. I just have a fear of my data being lost and needing a hard copy for back up just in case. I'm actually in the reverse situation at the moment, but hopefully I will find that spiral soon.

Smart Tech Training

I had the opportunity to attend the Smart Board training sessions provided by the Smart Tech Company at Bishop Dunne last month. I learned many different ways of integrating Smart Boards into my current curriculum. They also provided many valuable resources for lesson templates and completed lessons that can be searched by content area, grade, and TEK. I thought this was very interesting knowing that you don't have to reinvent the will. I shared this information with teachers on my campus and they loved the sites as well.
Believe it or not I actually got a Smart Board in my room a week after the training session. It's supposed to be shared with my grade level, but as of now they have no interest in using it. My team has said they will just bring their students to my room during a Smart Lesson. The tech teacher on our campus said that she was going to attempt to schedule a professional development session with Smart Tech, because there are so many teachers in our building who are not utilizing their boards.
My favorite templates are on Heather Lamb's homepage and they are the Koosh Ball and Fly Swatter templates. Kindergarten students love being able to hit and throw things at the board. I would recommend attending one of these trainings, someone actually won a Smart Board and other cool Smart Tech products. The links below will take you the resources that were shared during the training.

Heather Lamb's Homepage

Teachers Love Smart Boards

The Smart Exchange

Mentoring Experiences Day 6 - 11/17 - Power Point

It is now day 6 of our mentoring sessions and it will probably be the last session until I get through finals. We have the whole week off next week for Thanksgiving so when we return I'm going to be a walking zombie from keeping late hours. All I'm going to want to do at 3:40 is go home. I've explained to my mentee that I have a lot of projects to get submitted and I have to study for finals. She's quite understanding and just appreciates what I have taught her so far. We may have one more session prior to the Christmas break if not we will continue when she returns from maternity leave.
Today's session was a continuance of the previous session. I allowed her to complete each slide independently and I was there if she need any assistance. There were a couple of times she wasn't sure if she was doing the correct thing, but for the most part she has the basics down. She completed slides F-I today. After she completed the slides we went back to the previous slide so I could introduce adding animations to the text and the images. I didn't include this in the first session, because I didn't want it to be overwhelming. We just did some simple fly in and fly out animations and I told her that she could play around with them to figure out the ones she liked. She stated that she was either going to get a new laptop soon or get hers repaired so she could be practicing all of her computer skills while she was home on maternity leave.
I'm very pleased how the sessions turned out hopefully we will continue our sessions next semester and she can begin to consider herself as a techie.

Mentoring Experiences Day 5 - 11/10 - Power Point

Wow, it's day already our 5th session. Time does fly when you are having fun. Today we are going to begin adding slides to the Power Point slide show. There will be one slide for each letter of the alphabet that contains the upper and lower case letter and a picture that begins with that letter sound. We chose the two content layout during our previous session. We decided to use a Comic Sans MS font of 225 in red and used a black background so the letters and images could stand out. We got through A-E and will continue with the rest of the alphabet during future sessions.
My mentee was excited about how her production was developing. She said she didn't realize how simple it was to use the computer after someone showed you what to do. She even made the connection that if you learn Word then everything else is pretty similar. I'm excited about her excitement.

Mentoring Experiences Day 4 - 11/3- Power Point

Today we are on our 4th session of the mentoring experience. We will begin with the basic skills of creating a PowerPoint slide. We will add a slide during each session on this topic to create a slide show. So the slide show is relevant to something that my mentee could use in her classroom or share with the teacher she assist we are going to begin a slide show that illustrates each letter of the alphabet with an image that begins with the sound of the letter.
When I opened up a new PowerPoint document my mentee gasped and stated that she wasn't going to be able to do it, because it looked too hard. I explained that it wasn't as hard as it looked and that a lot of the features she learned in Word would apply in PowerPoint.
We started off the session by beginning to create a title page. We walked through how to select a style and background design. She played around with it until she found one that she liked then we moved on to adding text to the slide. Adding the text was simple for her. She remembered how to change the font color and bold the text and decided that she wanted to do both. We started creating the next slide and I had to introduce how to choose a slides layout. After that we decided to use the two content layout and include the letter on one right side and a picture on the left.
Choosing the layout was as far as we got on this session next week we will work on adding text and images to the slides for each alphabet.

Mentoring Experiences Day 3 -10/27 - Microsoft Word

Today is day 3 of our sessions and we are still working with Word. I am going to teach a few more skills with word and then we will move on to a different application to break the monotony. We will revisit word periodically and I will begin having her incorporate it into her daily activities.
Today's session consisted of reviewing all of the skills from the previous to lessons, but today we added inserting clip art, pictures, borders, shading, and changing the page color. I also added in changing the page orientation and margins. My mentee was able to perform all of the task, although she needed me to walk her through some of the steps after I had demonstrated them.
Ironically she asked me to create a parent letter for an upcoming field trip and I passed the task on to her. So the remainder of the session involved her creating the parent letter. Her typing speed is not very fast, therefore I typed up the letter. I centered the entire document and typed it in 7pt. font. She had to apply the correct alignment, change the font to a larger size, insert a picture, bold the title line of the letter, and apply a page border. She actually did very well and I provided the necessary scaffolding to ensure she didn't get frustrated during the process. The sessions are continuing to go well and I'm enjoying them as much as she is.

Mentoring Experiences Day 2 - 10/20 - Microsoft Word

Today's session went much smoother. Today I taught her how to open a saved document and we retrieved the practice document that we created last week. We quickly reviewed the skills that were taught in the previous lesson and were able to move forward in tackling Word, because she retained the information from the previous session. I also had her to practice using the shortcut keys to perform various functions. In addition to reviewing previous skills I introduced how to save a document (I didn't do this last week, because she had to leave so I just saved it myself.), how to align paragraphs on a page (center, justify, left, right), and how to include bullets/numbers. Believe it or not it took a little over 30 minutes for this session.
Overall the session went well. I was asked what we were going to be working on the next week so I'm assuming that I am retaining her interest and she is enjoying the sessions.

Mentoring Experiences Day 1- 10/13 - Microsoft Word

The purpose of my mentoring experience is to provide one of the teacher's assistance with general technology awareness. The first session was very frustrating for my mentee, because she felt like she didn't know anything when I began asking questions to assess her technology proficiencies. It is true that at the current moment she does not possess any strong technology skills. I provided constant reassurance that the purpose of our sessions was to develop her skills and that she didn't need to get frustrated, because I was fine with explaining anything in depth. We decided to start out working with Word, because this is a very common tool used by teachers. I wasn't sure how basic I needed to begin until we had a chance to meet. After this first session I realized that it is going to take a while to develop her skills so we will focus on one application for a while.
I had to begin the session with how to open word and starting a new document. Basically, this session covered typing text into a word document, changing the font, and adding special features to the font like color, size, italics, underlines and bold print. I tried to introduce the shortcuts that are available for some of these features, but that was information overload for the first session. I just typed up the short cuts and gave her a handout to practice outside of our sessions. If this basic information is retained we will review the skills taught in this session and move on to new objectives.

MTT Culminating Reflection- It's a Wrap !!!!!!!!

I did not realize how much hard work and effort had been put into the program until I began reflecting on all of the productions, papers, and sleepless nights I have had. I have truly been shown something in me that I didn't know was there. I always knew I had motivation, but it was truly tested during the MTT courses. This was my first time ever taking online courses and initially it was extremely frustrating, but over time it got better. Honestly, I still prefer face-to-face sessions, but the self-pacing is a perk once you obtain the discipline.
The MTT program requires a lot of discipline and extreme time management. I have gotten much better with both of these attributes since beginning the program. However, sometimes it just seems like you are down to the wire trying to get things turned by the due dates. Even though the program is rigorous and demands a lot of time I have learned a lot about technology integration in the classroom over the past 3 semesters. Previously I viewed technology as a separate content area that would consume extra instructional time. Now I am beginning to seamlessly integrate technology into my lessons, and help other teachers do so as well. I never thought that I would have the capabilities to conduct a professional development sessions that were both interesting and beneficial to teachers instruction. Nevertheless, my grade level is beginning to get excited about technology and I even have a mentee that I am bringing into the digital age. I'm excited about my future as an MTT and becoming more proficient in technology integration as a classroom teacher.
I feel a sense of accomplishment knowing that I have completed all 4 MTT courses. I am truly grateful that I no longer have to get up on Saturday mornings for class :) I will continue to seek professional development opportunities and keep up with the trends and research in educational technology beyond the scope of this program. The next obstacle is passing the MTT certification test :/

Executing A Professional Development Plan - Having Enough Time In The Day

When we were told that we had to create a professional development plan for this course I panicked. I really felt like I was going to completely bum this assignment. I knew what professional developments were needed from talking to the teachers on my campus and conducting the needs assessment, but I did not know how I was going to follow through with actually presenting the information. My main concern was getting teachers interested in coming and then having activities that would be beneficial to them as well as interesting. I know how teachers dread professional development sessions, because they are usually lecture based and terribly boring. Much to my surprise the teachers were really interested in receiving the training and gave me insight on what they really wanted to learn about. I designed the plan based on what they wanted to learn and provided opportunities for hands-on practice and open dialogue. So far the sessions have gone well. They are still a work in progress I may get the opportunity to squeeze another one in before the break (after I meet all of my assignment deadlines and prepare for finals.)
The biggest issue in the school day is time. I struggled trying to figure out when I could conduct my sessions. Every available time slot in the day is filled with grade level meetings with administration, after school meetings, after school tutoring, and mandatory after school professional development. To even think about getting anyone to come before school would be ludicrous. So I had to work really hard at finding the time in the day. It got very frustrating, because a few of the days that I had planned to conduct my sessions we ended up having unexpected meetings.
Professional development is necessary for teachers growth, but there is so many limitations on time. After talking to a friend at another campus she stated that her school had extended planning sessions one day a week for each grade level. The teachers actually have a 90 minute block weekly to meet. This would be a perfect opportunity to conduct training sessions. I have presented this idea to administration for next year so we will see how it turns out. This type of initiative takes team work, because the specials teachers would have each grade level twice a day. Hopefully everyone gets on board and this can be successful on our campus as well.

Extreme Frustration & End of the Semester Blues

Can anyone relate to extreme frustration? I am now at that point. I don't know if I'm having the end of the semester blues from trying to meet my upcoming assignment deadlines for my two classes or what, but all I know is that I am at an extremely high stress level right now. It seems like everything that can go wrong is going wrong and as if all the preparations that I have made are pointless. You would think that 24 hours in a day would be enough time to accomplish the world, but then life happens. Life has truly had an effect on school for me this semester. I've been sick like 3 times and we all know how hard playing catch up can be. On the days I schedule to complete assignments some situation arises that I have to tend to and I have to change my game plan. If it wasn't for the grace of extensions I would be up the creek without paddles with a hole in the bottom of by boat.
I actually think my wick is beginning to burn out and I'm just ready to get the whole grad. school thing behind me. Being tired is an understatement when you strongly consider dropping classes and its beyond the point of a refund and the class is not offered again for another year. Luckily I can see the light at the end of the tunnel by knowing that I have more hours behind me than ahead of me. Knowing I only have 2 more semesters remaining is what keeps me from completely losing my motivation. I'm learning how to take one day at a time and not getting too overwhelmed by my to do list.
I am looking forward to the Christmas break, because it will be my 1st break from both school and work since I began the program in January. I know once I get over this end of the semester hump I'll be fine. A little rest will rejuvenate me and get me back in momentum to conquer the tasks ahead of me.

The Mentoring Experience

Being a mentor is quite an interesting experience. I am able to actually see some true talents in myself that I take for granted. I have never considered myself to be extremly tech savvy, but in the eyes of others I seem to be a techie. My mentee throughout the semester has been very easy to work with, because she's eager to learn. The first session started out with a verbal needs assessment so I could have an idea of what concepts to teach. It wasn't very hard to decide where to begin, because I had chosen a candidate who had no idea what to do with a computer. When asked what areas she would like to receive help in my mentee quickly stated that all she knew how to do was turn the computer on. During our initial meeting we decided to focus on Word and Power Point, because these are the most frequently used applications by teachers. I knew once I could get her proficient in using these tools we could advance to other tech. areas.