Reflections for the Year.

Another school year is coming to a close. I am looking forward to vacation and playing with my ipad in the days to come. What are my thoughts and reflections from this past year? Because of my Skype PLN Group (NCEdTech), I have grown in knowledge and confidence this year. I have experimented with a lot of new web 2.0 tools and become somewhat proficient with them. Some of my favorites, as stated in previous blogs, are LiveBinders, Glogster, blogs, wikis, and Prezi. I have over the last several months gotten a little more comfortable with posting on this blog and trying to post at least once a week if not more. I created a wiki for the first time this year and the more I add to it, the more I think of ways for classroom teachers to use a wiki. I am attending an online summer camp with PBWorks to learn more about best practices for wikis in the classroom. I became a DEN Star and a SMART Exemplary Educator. I was also accepted to the DEN Summer Institute in Boston.  All of these things are a direct result of interacting with my PLN. I created a twitter account last summer before going to necc 2009 in Washington and never really did much with it. Once I started using HootSuite, I was able to follow a lot of well respected technology educators on Twitter. I don't tweet very often, but I sure do get a lot of ideas and resources from my twitter group.

I offered quite a lot of staff development for the teachers at my school this year that I feel good about. I created a Reading Workshop worth 1 CEU that teachers could do at their own pace online and a SMART Notebook Workshop worth 1 CEU utilizing the Lesson Activity Toolkit. There were several 1 hour (contact) workshops on other technologies also. I have so many ideas for creating staff development workshops next year. Several of these ideas have come from my PLN and the professional magazines that I read. At the beginning of the year I asked what type of staff development they needed and was able to accommodate their needs. This year I created a wall through Wallwisher asking for input on what to offer next year for staff development.

Look out summer, here I come!