Standard 1: Facilitate
and inspire student learning and creativity.
In this area, I would rate myself above average and when I say average, I’m rating myself against the fellow teachers at my school. Just this month, we are talking about the phases of the moon and observing the night sky for the whole month. I shared a free smart phone application with all my students where they can look up the phases of the moon for any day of any year. Even though the students are expected to go outside every night after dinner to observe the night sky, I know this may not be a reachable goal for every single family. With affordable smart phones offered by various cell phone carriers, I know almost all the students have someone in the family with a smart phone. Even on very cloudy nights, we can utilize the app to tell the shape of the moon.
In this area, I would rate myself above average and when I say average, I’m rating myself against the fellow teachers at my school. Just this month, we are talking about the phases of the moon and observing the night sky for the whole month. I shared a free smart phone application with all my students where they can look up the phases of the moon for any day of any year. Even though the students are expected to go outside every night after dinner to observe the night sky, I know this may not be a reachable goal for every single family. With affordable smart phones offered by various cell phone carriers, I know almost all the students have someone in the family with a smart phone. Even on very cloudy nights, we can utilize the app to tell the shape of the moon.
Standard 2: Design
and develop digital age learning experiences and assessments.
I can only say that I’m average in this area. I am working in a district where we have a very strict schedule that we have to follow for each of the core subjects that we teach. I only teach math and science and math takes up the majority of teaching time in each of my blocks. I have to follow a day-to-day program that inspire students to discover and investigate in math and technology is rarely involved.
I can only say that I’m average in this area. I am working in a district where we have a very strict schedule that we have to follow for each of the core subjects that we teach. I only teach math and science and math takes up the majority of teaching time in each of my blocks. I have to follow a day-to-day program that inspire students to discover and investigate in math and technology is rarely involved.
Standard 3: Model
digital age work and learning.I can proudly say that I am above average on this standard.
I have been the webmaster of our school for almost 10 years now and every
summer I go to several trainings on incorporating technology into the school
system. I learned lots of cool ways to present lessons and to keep parents and
other teachers informed about school activities and sometimes even district
events. The only obstacle that I find challenging is that the majority of the
parents of our students aren’t fluent in English, so if I have to utilize an
automatic texting service to send reminder to my parents, I have to have the
messages translated.
Standard 4: Promote
and model digital citizenship and responsibility.I have to admit that I can only rate myself average in this
area. Even though the use of smart phones are very common among the families my
school serves, we are not a technology campus. We don’t encourage the students
to bring their own technology into the learning in the school even though we do
have wireless services for everyone to use. As classroom teachers, we rarely
use technology own at home too, whatever we choose to use in the classroom
comes from our district. Our students know very little about digital
citizenship and responsibility from the school.
Standard 5: Engage in
professional growth and leadership.I am very confident to say that I rank high in this area. I
think technology is a very important and essential part in our lives, whether
it’s personally, academically, or professionally. If there is new technology
that I can utilize in any way in my life, I will try to learn it. I am the only
teacher on my team who wrote a grant for iPad Minis to be used in tutorials to
maximize tutoring efforts!
I can use my technology strengths to help my whole teaching team become leaders in teaching with technology. They all have smart phones and they use their smart phones a lot for personal purposes but very little professionally. I can show them how easy it is to incorporate some simple technology into their teaching to maximize the teaching and gain the desire results. As the webmaster of the school, I can also offer school-wide training sessions or one-on-one sessions to get more teachers familiarize with navigating their own teacher webpages and add the latest gadgets onto their webpages to get their parents involved. I hope to eventually bring our campus up to meet the expectations of the district in technology and help our students become successful 21st century learners.
Even though I try to learn as many new technology gadgets as much as I can, I am a little limited on incorporating technology into my math lessons because of the math curriculum that I am expected to follow from our district. I need to know our math curriculum very well and be very up-to-date with the latest apps that help tackle certain TEKS and incorporate using them in my classroom on top of our math program. Another step that I need to take is to review the technology trainings that I have gone to in the past decade and set a goal for myself where I have to add a new teaching method each year so I can keep the students interested in the lessons and also learn about technology and how it’s changing the way we learn and teach.
