Techie by Nature

          Before we began our coaching cycle, the cooperating teacher and I sat down and discussed what he wanted to improve in his instruction. Although he is very knowledgeable in his subject area (English), he mentioned that he is struggling with teaching English to ELL and special education students. While completing my first observation for this teacher, I made sure to not only observe the lesson itself, but also how the students reacted to the lesson well. I tried to think of ways to accommodate and reach these students without having to rewrite the lesson.  Although I have not had the opportunity to teach English to high school students, I do have experience of teaching ELL students an English based subject, United States history from the 1800s to 2008. I believe that my experience was a little more difficult because I had to consider that not only do my students not have the academic vocabulary to comprehend the lessons, but they also did not...

  I have never considered myself an individual that has enough knowledge to “coach” another teacher or professional. I am aware that I have a lot of knowledge, experience, and skills to offer, but have never been confident enough to say, “let me help you with that.”   I have, however, been a soccer coach for some time, and felt that I did have enough experience and knowledge to help guide and direct players in the game. This is what I think of when I consider coaching. I have had to shift my thinking to consider the classroom as the “field”, students as the “players” and the teacher as the “coach”, therefore I am coaching the coach.  I feel that this is a better and more accurate representation of what an instructional or technology coach is asked to accomplish.  While in the classroom, I often despised when an instructional coach would come in to observe. I felt like they were trying to “catch” me doing something incorrectly and run back to report it to my admi...

      When we think about all the different types of professional development that teachers are given, we usually see a consultant or “guru” hired to give a professional development on a specific area or subject. While this may seem beneficial, a caveat to this is that the presenter does not know our students or school like we do.     Although they may give us some great tips and information, many principals don’t consider their teachers to be “experts”. I think we should empower our faculty to provide PDs for the school. Give the power back to the teachers. If a teacher seems really excited or knowledgeable about something, let them present on the subject. As a principal, this will save money (or you could pay the teacher!), and will embolden your staff to work and share together.     In the future, I will DEFINITELY ask my faculty BEFORE I hire an outside consultant or speaker.     First, I thought about the types of tr...

          Whether in person or online, professional development has to take place. How do we promote engagement with learners? When considering the instructional design process, one must consider their learners first. It is important to determine WHO you will be teaching and then move into WHAT you’ll be teaching. After determining your WHO and WHAT , we then move on to the HOW . The HOW is where a training can be made or broken.  According to The Essentials of Instructional Design: Connecting Fundamental Principles with Process and Practice, “the content and instructional activities used to convey that content can be organized into a curriculum” (Brown & Green, 2020). Once we have established the content of the curriculum, presenters can then organize instructional activities for the participants.  There are many tools available to presenters when it comes to delivering content. Two tools that I have found to be the most effective and bene...

               While taking ED 677, we were tasked with creating and maintaining a Twitter account to expand our professional learning community. This helped us to engage with and build a community of likeminded professionals that we could use to help better our understanding of using social media as professional development.       Early on in the course, we were asked to create an annotated bibliography for a topic that we were assigned. My topic was “Social Media as Professional Development”. There was so much that I wanted to say regarding this topic, but found that the research regarding the platforms that I wanted to explore does not exist yet. For example, I wanted to explore the impact that TikTok has had on educational professional development, but was unable to find any sort of articles or research pertaining to the platform. I believe that this is because the platform is still developing and not much research has...

According to Standard 3 of the Alabama Educator Code of Ethics , it states that an educator must abide with local, state, and federal mandates. When completing the SchoolSims simulation Social Media: Integrity in Community , I couldn’t help but see this scenario as a very real possibility for school administrators. According to Digital Leadership: Changing Paradigms for Changing Times , “ It is apparent that the majority of our students, stakeholders, teachers, and administrators are engaged in online spaces and have ample means to access the internet. Within this space, they are creating, communicating, collaborating, and discussing. This is occurring on and across a variety of sites and through the use of both mainstream and emerging tools” (Sheninger, 2019).  While I   completed the simulation, I looked at it with a dual lens, one of an administrator and one as a student’s parent. As the administrator during this simulation, you are tasked with making tough choices concern...

When it comes to choosing the right tech for your situation, it’s important to consider exactly what you want the outcome of the implementation to be. According to Education Elements,  the biggest takeaway is this: "When selecting the right device for your district, assess key areas such as student population (and staff population) served, implementation challenges, and software availability before making the hardware decision. " When deciding on the proper equipment for the task, this can be summarized as considering the “who, what, and how” of device implementation. Firstly, administrators need to consider WHO will b e u s ing the technology. This is very important to consider because the “who” determines how you will roll out the equipment. For example, if the district is buying newer, more sustainable laptops for teachers and staff, their professional development will consist of care, use, and instructional implementation.  If the new tech roll out is for students, a tech...