Aside from knowing that KF refers to Kenan Fellowship and not KFC, Kentucky Fried Chicken, the Kenan Fellowship has made a difference in my role as an educator.
Sitting in the student’s seat for hours on end has taught me what it is like to receive professional development. I have recognized how different all of us are in our interests and ability to grasp new material, especially tech tools. I have revamped the delivery of PD to teachers I support this year.
As a result of my Kenan Fellowship, I am using Edmodo with teachers in
our district to provide a platform for sending announcements and for teachers to share what they discover and want to share with their peers at other schools. I have since added the AudioBoo recording app within Edmodo to see how world language teachers and students can record speaking projects. I have created student and teacher accounts to better understand how it works. At the June Professional Development at NCCAT, Jason Lineburger encouraged me to use Edmodo as a platform for teachers to share resources and to archive my digital newsletter. If teachers become comfortable with Edmodo, they can organize notices, assignments and even student recordings within Edmodo. If world language teachers regularly use a recording device in their classrooms for students to practice speaking and record speaking for oral assignments, this will drastically change world language teaching and learning.
As a result of my externship, I know more about Home Base. I am aware 
of what resources are there for world language teachers. I am aware of the rubric North Carolina used in rating resources to be placed in Home Base. I have tried to stay abreast of changes in Home Base and look for ways to use some of the features I learned about in Home Base: searching for resources, saving resources to my own account, saving resources so that my school can access them, creating assessments, attaching resources to assignments and my teacher calendar.
I look forward to becoming more savvy as the resources that have been tagged are populated into Home Base. As of this writing, the majority of the resources tagged for world languages have yet to be populated into the database. I look forward to becoming more aware of how to work within Power School. I received my password ten days ago and am just beginning to discover the steps to go from Power School to Schoolnet.
One benefit of my externship has been the discovery of many excellent resources online. This would be expected if one is assigned to research those resources. Nonetheless, it is shocking how many incredible resources are online that one never really finds, unless someone leads you there, unless some website mentions them and unless you just stumble upon them. I will additionally link some of the home pages for some of these resources to the new Google site for the World Language teachers in our district in the hopes that they too will find them useful.
I am trying not to overwhelm teachers with too many tech tools. I have a calendar of what tech tools or what methodology to embrace in a year-long professional development plan. That calendar is much richer due to the tech tool training with Kenan PD.
There is also something intangible about the difference a Kenan Fellowship makes. When someone treats you with such respect, puts you in contact with other educators who are curious and have a desire to continually improve, you are transformed. In this year’s political environment, it is especially rewarding to believe that there is a group called Kenan Fellows Programs that believes in teachers, that believes in supporting teachers and that believes in the importance of ongoing professional development.