Individual Plan for 21st Century Teaching (IP21) Professional Goals
a. promote, support, and model creative and innovative thinking and inventiveness.
(Goal 1) 3. Students gain access to other students, experts, resources and places both face-to-face and virtually for collaborative work.
Parish Virtual World Religions (June 2011) was a terrific medium for accomplishing this goal. Students had access to one another and to me, their instructor, completely through a live, virtual classroom (using Blackboard Collaborate). Moreover, I was able to guide the students to connect with other professionals and their available online resources (e.g., university and other professionally sponsored websites.) We did meet face-to-face as well, particularly in the period leading up to the start of the course (we met in late May).
(Goal 2) 4. Students are able to connect their learning experience within real contexts.
b. develop technology-enriched learning environments that enable all students to pursue their individual curiosities and become active participants in setting their own educational goals, managing their own learning, and assessing their own progress.
This year I ventured into using Google sites digital portfolios for my advisees leading up to student-led P/T conferences. (Thanks to Craig Savage who supplied a screen-cast [via screen cast-o-matic] with instructions for how to set up the portfolios for my advisees.) Though this was not a learning context, per se, it did enable my advisees to communicate their individual goals and interests for next year with one another, with their parents, and with me in a virtual setting.
With specific regard to course material, I also continued to utilize Twitter for my senior CRI religion class, a course addressing the rise of global terrorism as it relates to religion. A lot of students have been talking this year about using Twitter more than Facebook, and so I kept the project. Students followed my list of global news tweets relating to the discussions and overall material for the course. However, they also created their own lists according to their relevant interests. Depending on their goals for the course and this project, they could follow as many lists, agencies, etc. that they wished, so long as they shared what they found/learned with their classmates and with me at the end of the course.
(Goal 3) 7. Teachers develop a technology-enriched environment by using the SMART Board to:
- Project clear visuals.
- Use any software
- Save and review work
- Interact with your instructional materials
- Use or create templates
- Involve your students
- Support students presentations
- Interact with your students
- Manage resources flexibly and efficiently
- Share with the school community
One of the biggest challenges for me this year was to create a Prezi for my Bible and Western Culture classes (especially for the Dual Credit class). The overall objective, of course, was to use the Prezi in class via the Smart Board. What was particularly trying was to use slides/images for material relating directly to literature. Having the students face the Smart Board yet also compare my points there with the literature also in front of them via handouts caused them to continually look up, then down, then up, all while trying to take notes in a notebook or on a laptop. It's been an interesting and time consuming effort to come up with a Smart Board presentation like this that works well in this context. It's been fairly successful so far, though; no doubt it will need some tweaking as we head into next year. Here is a link to the Prezi for this course, sould anyone be interested: http://prezi.com/p7r4krlylgy4/610-dual-credit-bible-and-western-culture/