Professional Development

Three strengths of mine are:

Three areas of improvement for me are:

Becoming involved in online communities and news to learn of new ways of integrating technology
Finding applications that are modeled for real-world issues
Making technology more effective and efficient.

Find places online to keep up to date and learn more about technology integration
Read up on copyright
Learn how to use technology to highlight diversity.

I made a tutorial of how to use Google Docs to make a chart for organizing textual evidence.
I created an Emaze presentation that demonstrated how to optimize Google search

I have an account on the Open Educational Resources website, where I can browse lesson plans (efficient; it saves me time creating them from scratch!) and upload my own.
I have a Twitter account where I can interact and share with the educational community using hashtags such as #edchat and #ELA to find the latest news and ways of integrating technology.
I learned about Project-Based Learning and created my own lesson plan tackling a real-world issue.
The high school English teacher I observed showed me how to use Canvas to organize information and assignments so students will always have access to them, which is an effective and efficient daily use of technology.

Again, my Twitter account taps into the educational community to find the latest innovations and websites/products I can use in the classroom.
I have become familiar with Creative Commons and know what images my students can and cannot use in their work from the Internet.
I have learned about the existence of the National Center for Learning Disabilities and have found resources such as the Dyslexie font, accessibility tools on Windows computers, and the text-to-speech software Kurzweil.

Stay involved and updated in the community so I am aware of new resources and tools. I will probably accomplish this through Twitter and browsing education-centered blogs like Edutopia.
Learn and practice using multimedia tools like movie-making and various Adobe products. I've done some of this on my own time for my own purposes, but I want to look for specific ways of incorporating these tools into an English classroom.
Connect more with teachers around the world (likely through Twitter) to share ideas and teaching practices, as well as continuing to learn how to address diverse students. I've done some of this because I am involved in communities that seek to promote books written by and about minority groups for middle schoolers and young adults, but I want to also work on helping students with disabilities address the challenges they may face while reading and writing.

Olivia Gennaro