Now that my KFP year is coming to a close, I’d like to revisit a few of my thoughts from June 27, 2013, ten months ago.

In my Kenan fellowship, I hope to gain friendships. 

I have been so privileged to be part of a group of such wonderful people. After my Home Base peers and I presented at our final conference, we stuck around for quite some time chatting about our projects, our personal lives, and giving input on a Fellows’ daughter’s wedding dress choice. Although we’re spread out across the state, I very much value their expertise and have already called on them in times of confusion, exasperation, or need of support.

I hope to gain cutting edge knowledge and skills.

Definitely! From my experience exploring assessment options in Home Base to trying out the applications and techniques I learned about in KFP PD, I am a lot more likely to dive right in and try new things. I find myself tweaking little things here and there–reviewing an assessment to check for rigor and finding that I need to butcher it (more often than I care to admit), or planning to have students post QR codes by family photographs that link to a descriptive paragraph. I’m also less stubborn. Previously, I never would have flipped a classroom. It just doesn’t fit my personality. But I’ve tried a few lessons and see the worth in it. I know that not only is it possible to innovate, but that I’m willing to. I’ve found ways to use BlendSpace (previously EdCanvas) and PhotoPeach just because I saw them in action in Ed Talks and want to know how my kids will react to them.  I also pass on what I learn. An upper-grade composition teacher incorporated infographics into a lesson on persuasive writing from a Kenan PD day. A lower-grade teacher gave a benchmark on Home Base with the knowledge I gained in my project on creating and administering assessments through the Student Portal. Being on the forefront of the Home Base roll-out was helpful in a single-school LEA. Sometimes we don’t feel ‘in the loop’, so it was great to be aware of features changing dates.

I hope to learn how to advocate for myself, my school and my students. 

Advocating for my students and school was never hard, but now I have more to lobby for. For instance, seeing how much of a tech deficit we have stacked against the number of opportunities for technology to be incorporated, I’ve begun discussions with our IT Coordinator and administration to consider a Bring Your Own Device policy. I’m not certain it will come to fruition, but I’m certain it’s important to try, and I have as evidence that it can work the testimonies of Kenan Fellows who currently or previously worked in schools with similar policies.

Advocating for myself is a bit tougher.  I still feel incredibly small. Even after the third PD day meeting with Eric Guckian and Congressman Price, it’s tough to believe that teachers can affect change in their own field in North Carolina. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll be blocked out of a career that I love simply because I can’t afford it anymore. As time goes by and conditions don’t change, that reality becomes increasingly likely.

But at the very basest, I hope to find the best lesson plan for day one in a kindergarten Spanish classroom.

Kindergarten students can now greet someone in Spanish, say their name, count to 20, identify 11 colors, name 6 family members, describe their outfits, sing the seasons, and much more. Some lessons ideas I got from uploading resources to Home Base (like the song “Vengan a Ver mi Granja” to learn animals), and some I picked up from colleagues (like stuffing a tied-off glove for students to ‘shake hands’ with as they practice meeting a new person in Spanish).

As a charter school teacher, I feel a bit isolated from public schools and the decisions that affect us all.  It’s a very different feel from my years in public schools, and I wanted to feel ”tuned in” again. 

I definitely feel tuned in again. I know teachers of many disciplines in my own county, and across the state. I’ve used Kenan Fellows as liaisons to collaborate with Spanish teachers in other schools, so I don’t feel as isolated. Seeing the loss of good teachers from the state and hearing of the pressure I feel echoed by such talented individuals has made me feel part of a movement, and rallied me to use my voice as a teacher. Knowing the dedication that a Fellow has for his or her work amplifies the motivation that is already fueled by co-workers, students and their families and spurs me on. I will miss our gatherings and will be wondering what next year’s KFs are learning at NCCAT and how their externships are going, but I think the skills and mindsets I’ve acquired will carry on.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’ll try to address both prongs of my work in this post:

1. Researching, evaluating and tagging Open Educational Resources into Home Base

2. Coordinating with DPI, presenting at conferences and creating the items featured here

1. Researching resources was a very time-consuming process. At first I loved looking for standards-aligned resources that facilitated deeper learning. Soon, it devolved into tedium. Most resources had to be passed over for one reason or another–they required a log-in, they had an ad for an M.Ed. program on the side, they didn’t give explicit directions on how to differentiate. It makes sense that it became arduous. Truly choosing a quality resource from the internet takes a lot of time and evaluation.

This experience has made me more cautious about the resources I borrow from others, and the resources that I create. Even for something as simple as a picture, I now must think through all its qualities and abilities before committing to it. I can only hope that going forward, some of the resources I’ve tagged save a teacher an hour of planning, inspire a lesson or a unit, or become the sought-after puzzle piece to a lesson to make it truly successful or memorable.

2. Partnering with DPI has been a great experience. I have always wondered what went on behind those walls, and I’ve had my assumptions. Now I know how nuanced and complications of what’s passed down from the state. DPI representatives aren’t always in full control of the situation. Many public and private entities affect what is eventually passed down to teachers, but DPI has to be the face of it. I know what it’s like to have to stand in support of something I’m not fully on board with yet and try and support it whole-heartedly–much in the way a teacher stands with administration on school procedures not always for her own beliefs but to present a unified front. While I have been required to delve early on into the features of Home Base as one of its ambassadors, I’ve seen the advantages of ‘early adoption’. The sooner you buck up and try something, the quicker you’ll find a way to make it work for you.

In the future, I hope my findings and presentations will have encouraged people to explore Home Base and see if it works for them before the July 15th Home Base deadline. Much in the same way I don’t care how people vote (although I certainly have my own beliefs) but believe they cannot bemoan their government if they don’t vote, I don’t care whether people opt into Home Base or not as long as they try it out. The vetted resources may not be worth the price tag for school systems, and they may have similar applications that help collect and display student data. A combination of programs may work better for an LEA than the single Pearson package, or Home Base may be the solution to all their problems. It doesn’t matter, as long as teachers try it out for themselves. I know I’ve influenced a history teacher and a curriculum coordinator from the Collaborative Conference on Student Achievement to experiment with creating an assessment in Home Base. I worked with my school’s IT manager to administer one of my assessments on my class of guinea pigs, and now we give at least one of our school’s benchmarks through the system. Hopefully I create more little ripples of influence in encouraging teachers to actively participate in evaluating the system and giving feedback.

 

I feel like every time I sit down to write my year’s Professional Development Plan for school, I write something about technology. It’s not that I’m incompetent with technology; I feel more comfortable with it than most people. But there’s always room for improvement. So, I’m pleased that so much of my fellowship involved the use of technology.

Over the summer, through my hunt to tag 250 online resources, I needed to multi-task.  I needed to have a PDF file of the NC Summary rubric open by which I judged each resource. I needed to have a temporary excel spreadsheet open when I could paste URLs I wanted to return to and jot some notes. I needed to have tabs open for e-mail so I could ask questions of my team or mentors, for the back-end website I was uploading into, and for more than one resource at a time. Web searches can take you pretty far down the rabbit hole, so I found myself clicking ‘Open in a new tab’ more than anything else. Because I needed to go back and forth between so many different websites and programs, the Lenovo tablet worked great for me. I could write some notes from trainings in the OneNote app, scroll over to the web browser and tag resources, and switch to desktop mode to type in a Microsoft Office application.

My project wasn’t a lesson plan with students as end users; it was almost part-evaluation and part-PR. So, I created videos like this one or this one to answer some questions teachers were asking about how Home Base’s instructional resources were being chosen. I felt compelled to use Animoto, an application we’d exploring during NCCAT, to create an upbeat video in support of Home Base. Sometimes it was tough to cheer on a program that wasn’t being rolled out smoothly in every school, and to have your co-workers mistakenly believe you have some influence in making it better.

My experiences creating PR-style videos and moreover going through the harrowing process of screen-casting enabled me to use my technology in class to flip a class or have absent students review (sorry, that one’s on TeacherTube so it’s kid-friendly).