ISTE Standard #5

5. Engage in Professional Growth and Leadership
Teachers continuously improve their professional practice, model lifelong learning, and exhibit leadership in their school and professional community by promoting and demonstrating the effective use of digital tools and resources.
Artifacts:
Continuing professional development...
  • Brigham Young University (BYU) Copyright Licensing Office
  • FETC Virtual Conference & Expo
  • Practical Approach to Making Virtual and Blended Learning Successful in Your District
  • Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA)
    • Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA) is a free service to everyone.  Its Learning Objects are separated into categories, and then broken down into modules that are able to be used and reused in sequence or out of sequences.  Inexperience learners will benefit more if they follow through the modules in sequence, but more experienced learners can jump around to area of interests.
Reflection:
As a lifelong learner in various disciplines, I found Educational Technology to be a never ending field. As I explorer and experience virtual seminars, online instructions, and use educational technology tools, I find myself discovering new ways to present knowledge and ideas in a much more media rich medium. Some of the digital tools and resources used are listed on my Web Links webpage.

FETC Conference:  Keynote speaker, Mark Prensky, Practical Visionary, introduces a concept of “becoming.” The students become a whole person, the best that they can be. Being successful and competent at whatever they do. The students’ goal in education is not to learn, but “becoming.” The teachers are coaches or facilitators to the students. He goes on to talk about what content to teach and not so much about how, where or when the student learn.

FETC - My Reflection:  I like this approach, becoming a better person instead of learning what is necessary to get an A in a given course. Having a coach at your side guiding and challenging you is a good concept in education. I did well in sports with a good coach. In education, a similar concept can easy be applied for better performance.

Making Virtual and Blended Learning Successful...:  Watching the presentation and listening to a real life example of how Quakertown Community School District implemented online/blended program by going through the ADDIE (Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, and Evaluate) process helped reinforced this concept.  “The ability to begin with the end in mind” is critical when creating a strategic planning, according to Dr. Harrington.  I totally agree.  I heard of this before from the book, "7 Habits of Highly Effective People."  I learned to be successful in any project, I need to able to see in my mind the end product or otherwise, I may be going off to a tangent without realizing it. 

Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA) is a very useful, professional free service for my professional development as an Information technology (IT) and also, I use this service to teach my inexperience student assistants the fundamentals of the IT world.  The service provide various levels of technical knowledge from beginner to more advanced levels.  For example, I use the module “Exploring Windows 8” to introduce my student assistants to Windows 8.  At the end of the lesson, there is a self-assessment to report their understanding.  Another example, I advanced my professional development using the module, “SQL Server.”  Since I have background knowledge on SQL server and administration, I jumped to the “Microsoft SQL Server 2012 training: Reporting Services” course to learn a particular function within SQL.