Before I talk about my failure, I want to explain some background. First, my school district participates in this thing called Melt, which multi school districts from around the area participate in. There are a ton of different professional development sessions on various topics and you choose which ones you want to go to. Second, the 2014-2015 school year was my first year teaching. Third, my first year I signed up for 3 sessions, 2 one hour sessions and 1 two hour session. I went to my first two sessions which were nothing special and then I went to my third session which was going to be on GBLT. Everyone filed into the session and we waited and waited and no presenter showed up. One of the organizers of the event then showed up and explained that the presenter would not make it so I asked what people were interested in learning about from the session. Based on their feedback I volunteered to teach the session. I had just taught this topic to my 9th grade health classes and had a presentation already put together for that so I logged in and presented using that material. The session went really well and I got a lot of good feedback. Now that you have the background information I can explain my failure. This year I was asked to present at Melt in January. I said I would do it and came up with two different presentation topics to present on, Organization and Technology Tools. As I typed up the descriptions I knew I wanted them to be as interactive as possible with more time to apply and less time of me talking. Here are the descriptions for both of my sessions: 21ST CENTURY ORGANIZATION OF LEARNING SPACES In this session we will go over some different organization techniques and some management techniques that are student-centered as well as some that are teacher-centered. We cover both digital organization and learning space organization all while keeping our 21st Century students in mind. Come with an open mind and collaborative spirit. The presenter will adapt presentation to meet the questions and needs of audience but overall format will be approximately 20-30 minutes of lecture, including a TED Talk and sharing of pictures as well as explanations of how the presenter currently applies 21st Century organization in her middle/high school classroom, with the rest of the time open for questions and collaboration. All content areas and grade levels are welcome because many of the management and organization techniques covered during the session can be applied to any content area as well as grade level including elementary, middle, and high school settings. COOL TECH TOOLS & WAYS TO IMPLEMENT AND USE THEM In this session, we will not only learn about a variety of tech tools, we will also learn how to use them and ways to implement them into our classrooms. The format of this session will be 10-15 minutes of presentation with the rest of the time for hands on application and sharing of ideas, questions, and concerns. The tools we will cover include Plickers, Weebly, Explain Everything, Google Slides, Piktochart, Schoology, Twitter, Remind, Tackk & Smore. Even if you are familiar with how to use the tech tools listed above, I encourage you to come and learn new ways on how to use them in your classroom and share how you are currently using them with others. If you have no idea what any of those tech tools are or if they even exist, I encourage you to come as well and learn how to use these cool tech tools. Please bring your own devices including but not limited to cell phones, iPads, chromebooks, laptops, etc. Bringing your own device will allow you to get the full experience of using these different tools plus you will already have it set up and ready to go for use in your classroom. Bring a collaborative attitude and you will be sure to walk away with at least one cool new tool to bring technology into your classroom. With my descriptions in mind, I then created a website for my sessions instead of the typical PowerPoint route. I created the Cool Tech Tools page so that it could be self explanatory & have all the links they needed. I also included how I used each tool in my classroom. I planned nothing for the 21st Century Organization because I wanted to see what they wanted to know (I went back and added links after the session based on what we talked about). Below I have screenshots of the website and a link to the site. Now comes the day for presenting. I received the last two slots for the day, which I now know are not ideal, and found out I was in computer labs for both sessions. I got into my first session, 21st Century Organization, and set up. This lab was huge and not ideal for the vibe I wanted this session to have which was more a conversational type of vibe. I asked them what they were hoping to get out of the session or wanted to know and that got the conversation started. Most of the feedback I got was positive with one negative feedback. My takeaways from this session is to definitely ask what they want to know again, but have them post somewhere like a Padlet (either anonymously or not) so that everyone could share what they wanted to learn without having to talk. That would also help me organize my presentation and make sure I hit everything they wanted to learn. I also would prefer to not do this session in a lab and make it a BYOD so that if they want to organize while I present they can or they could just listen. My next session was Cool Tech Tools which was the last session, right after lunch and 35 people were signed up. I was more nervous for this one. I wanted to stay true to what I had said in my description 10-15 minutes of presentation and the rest of the session to implement and share ideas. I had a lot of material to get through in 15 minutes, so I talked really fast plus I was nervous and I talk fast when I'm nervous. I also use humor when I am nervous. I tried to give a quick overview of each site. I didn't give them the link right away (which next time I would as they walk in). Once I got done giving an overview of all the tools on the site I opened it up for questions. No one really had questions so then I gave them the website URL and said that they could explore. Some of then sat there for a little bit and didn't do anything and then left. Others picked out the tools they were interested in and asked me questions. After the session was over, I felt that it had not gone as well as I had hoped but it was't awful. The feedback I received agreed with my feeling because there were some negative comments as well as some positive comments. Some of the feedback included:
After I received the feedback I posted this apology on both the Melt 2016 home screen and the Cool Tech Tools page: "I apologize for those who found me rude and unprofessional. I was nervous as it was my first time presenting at Melt but that is no excuse. I truly love my students and have passion for what I do. What you saw was not a good representation of who I am as a person and as a professional. I hope you will consider coming to another session I present. I appreciate your feedback and will be using it to improve my presentations in the future! I realize should have explained myself better at the beginning of the session as to why I was going so quickly through the material. I created this resource to be used to explore individually rather than requiring me to explain everything for you to understand. I hope you will still use this resource and find it helpful. If you would like to contact me or give me more feedback on what I could do to improve my sessions you can fill out the form below. Thank you to everyone who attended my sessions! I sincerely apologize for disappointing you." I hope that the people who attended my session saw my apology and would be willing to come to another session I present. I also would like to thank the people who left me comments for their honestly because it has taught me what I need to work on. I sincerely appreciate everyone's feedback. I have learned a lot from this failure but it has not detoured me from presenting on professional development. I will try again and keep the feedback I received in mind.
For everyone reading this, please use the website I created as a resource. Here is the link again! I included a lot of information about what each app is & how to use it in the classroom plus links to tutorials, videos, the actual websites, examples, etc. I also keep this updated! I recently moved the tabs around different from the picture above and added information about the new feature for Quizlet.
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After having a month to think about and reflect on my first year of teaching, I know I was not the teacher I wanted to be. I did not ever expect to be the world's best teacher my first year teaching, but I know I could have done better in some aspects. I think I got caught up with trying to have everything done- lessons for all three classes planned, documents created, homework for my online classes done- and the stress of that caused me to lose focus on my students. Plus many times I did not create lessons or units to the high standard that I would have liked, I did not cultivate a classroom learning environment in the way I wanted it to be, and classroom management was a confusing struggle. The good news is that I've learned a ton from my failures. So instead of focusing on the bad I wanted to share a few things I learned. It was during the second half of year one that I started getting the hang of things a little more. I think the fact that I was willing to change and go with the flow helped me tremendously this first year. I changed so many things from the first half of the year to the second, including my classroom organization and classroom management techniques. A couple techniques that I used exclusively during the second half of the year that worked wonders for me were Hands & Eyes and Hands on Head. "Hands and Eyes" is a Whole Brain Teaching strategy that I used when I wanted my students complete attention on what I had to say. How it works I say "Hands and Eyes" and then students fold their hands together, turn their whole body towards me and look at me with their complete attention. Hands on your Head (when you're done) is something I used to help me tell who was done working and ready to move on and who was still working. Using this made it very obvious to me at a quick glance who was ready to move on and who wasn't (plus it keeps their hands occupied). How this one works is that when I say "Hands on Head" the students who are done rest both their hands on the top of their own heads. I waited to do this until I thought a majority of the class was done because I have the students keep their hands on their heads until I released them to move on. There are plenty of other ideas that I came up or found during year one that worked well, but these are the two, that I wish I would have used sooner and more often. I am hoping that during this coming school year I will have more time to post about some of these ideas I find or create so that others can use them in their classrooms as well! Looking forward to year two, in order to remedy some of my failures I have been looking and have found some good resources on classroom management as well as creating better lessons and learning environments for my students. One of these resources is where I got the picture above ( link to the full article is located at the bottom). I knew that classroom management was a struggle this year for me, but I didn't realize that the reason was because I was sabotaging my own classroom management until I read this. Turns out I did a lot of these, especially, number 1. I find it helpful to know A) that I am not the only one who did these things and B) know what exactly I did wrong so that I am able correct it for next year. There were so many things with classroom management that I was not prepared for this year and realistically, there was no way I could have been. There were so many things that my students did or didn't do that bothered me that I had never even thought about before. On the other hand, there were other areas of classroom management that I was prepared for which I think was mostly on the classroom organization front with my extras binder, calendar board, and SC (student center). All in all, year one was a success in my books. I left room for improvement, learned from mistakes, and I didn't give up. Year two here I come! I think this pictures quote fits nicely with what the article above is all about. This is my goal for this year. I know everything won’t be perfect but in the end students will not remember what I taught them, they will remember how I made them feel. I want them to be excited to be in class because they know I’m excited that they are there. I want them to feel good about who they are and who they will become. I want them to know that we will all make mistakes together and that we will learn and grow wiser from them. I want them to know each day is a new day and that we only get one chance at each day so we need to make the best of it. I want them to see that I care about them and get excited about learning because they see that I am excited about learning. When the days get tough, I will come back to these thoughts to remind myself of this goal. Now that my classroom is mostly set up, I've started thinking about actually teaching real students by myself! As that first-day quickly approaches, I found this article and I know I want to keep this advice in mind throughout my first year as a teacher. If you want to take a read I have the link below.
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AuthorI teach 7-9 Health Education & Computer 7 in rural southwestern Minnesota. I love using technology in my classroom and teaching students about how to live healthy and informed lives.
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