Melissa Blazejak
ePortfolio: Educational Technology
Strand 5
How has the professional development from this graduate program added to your professional growth, leadership in your educational setting, participation in local and global learning communities, and self-renewal as an educator, researcher, and collaborator?
For me, this entire program was professional development. I started out with no teaching background, not really sure if this was something I wanted to do, and ended the program extremely confident in my skills as a teacher and loving the field. My self-renewal is not so much in being an educator, but being able to have confidence in what I do, regardless of the task. I went from being a graphic artist, to a substitute teacher, and am currently an editor for a legal resource company. I would never have had the confidence to pursue my current career had it not been for this program. This program in itself was my professional development. I honed in on my writing skills, re-learned how to conduct research, and put my mind-set to “I can do this!”
For EDU 612, we had to write our professional development goals (Appendix Q). When I originally picked this artifact to put in my portfolio, I had every intention of reworking it and making it something better. While it may no be my best work, nor show that I understood the assignment, I had made this assignment something of my own. I put this artifact in here to show how far I’ve come since producing this document. Our professional development goals were meant to reflect our goals as teachers. My goal (at the time) was to just get certified. My goals were very shortsighted and now I understand that this assignment meant more long term.
In that regard, I my professional development goals should now reflect my philosophy on teaching with technology. It will be my goal (once I become a teacher) to use technology in every aspect of my teaching.
It is important to offer your students variety and excitementectures and handouts are the exact opposite. I want my students to be focused, engaged, and eager to learn more after the lesson. By incorporating technology into my plans, I will be doing just that!
In regards to being a researcher, and a curious person by nature, I will also strive to find innovative ways to deliver content. Whether it’s at my current job or years down the line in a classroom, I will always be looking for answers. One thing that I am most grateful for, from this program, is the EBSCO host (ERIC) database. This website is loaded with so many valuable resources that it should be offered to people who do not attend college. This website has been very beneficial to me, for this program, because I was able to find so much information on topics that the Internet just couldn’t handle. In terms of real research, this website has Google beat! Also, due to the valuable information, I have also learned how to spot accurate documents versus documents that only have fluff. Finding things from EBSCO is different than Google because you can tell that the information you are looking at is authentic and legitimate. Typing in terminology into Google just does not yield the same results as EBSCO.
While conducting my research for my ELL teacher resource website, I was able to find hundreds of journal articles and reports that related to the topic. With the Internet, I was able to find information, but to me it all seemed opinionated and pushy. For example, instead of telling me how students aquire language I would find information on how to teach them language.
Learning how ELL students acquire language is an important aspect to ELLs learning our language; most of the websites I came across did not offer much information on the topic. However, I was able to use my research skills to search for appropriate teaching videos related to ELL teaching strategies (Appendix Y). One website I stumbled upon was TeacherTube. This website is similar to YouTube but it focuses specifically on education. My website was not able to link directly to TeacherTube which was highly disappointing because the quality of work was so much better than YouTube.
Finally, I feel that I could improve greatly on my collaboration skills as a teacher. Due to my lack of an actual classroom, this ideal was hard for me to obtain. I am hoping that one day, I will be able to focus more on collaboration with other teachers. My only great achievement in this area is through my research project.
By creating an ELL resource website, I hope to offer my research and ideas to other teachers. I feel that my website offers valuable tools for all types of teachers and I would hope that they would in turn share valuable ideas and tips with me on how to make my website better, how to improve the content, and notify me of any changes in the field. I also feel that this website enforces the notion that I am willing to adapt to my students and their culture in order to support my students' needs. By having empathy for my students, understanding their culture, and respecting them I can open the gap for them to communicate more effectively in a second language.
References
Business & Legal Resources. (2014). Human resources management website -HR.BLR.com. Retrieved from http://hr.blr.com/
EBSCO Host. (2014). CONSULS | Catalog of the CSU Libraries & The CT State Library. Retrieved from
http://0-eds.b.ebscohost.com.www.consuls.org/ehost/search/basic?sid=2f42bb4f-2179-4cd1-895f-0389f9c03f4b%40sessionmgr111&vid=1&hid=110
Teachertube. (2014). TeacherTube. Retrieved from http://www.teachertube.com/