2.+Prof+Development

=** Professional Development **=

What can be uploaded to an e-portfolio as evidence of good teaching?
If you were a principal or superintendant, looking to hire a new teacher, what might you look for in a Taskstream e-portoflio in order to judge if this applicant would make a good teacher in your school?

Professional Development for Teachers using **Technology**
It is important for teachers to embrace technology for a number of reasons. One of the most prominant is that there are standards of technology laid out for teachers. Nation-wide the standards come from the National Educational Technology Standards for Teachers which can be found at: [] and briefly are:
 * Facilitate and Inspire Student Learning and Creativity
 * Design and Develop Digital-Age Learning Experiences and Assessments
 * Model Digital-Age Work and Learning
 * Promote and Model Digital Citizenship and Responsibility
 * Engage in Professional Growth and Leadership

The technology standards for the state of CT can be found at: [] and briefly are:
 * Educational Technology Concepts and Operations - Awareness and Use
 * Creating Environments for Learning
 * Productivity and Professional Practice
 * Social, Legal, Ethical and Human Issues

Keeping these standards in mind, it would be very important to be able to show your administrator that you are somewhat technology savvy in meaningful ways. It's important to present your e-portfolio with useful technology practices that you use.

Philosophy of Education Statement
The philosophy of education statement can be very valuable for administrators. For the technology portion, it shows that you are able to work a word processor, which is a basic but important skill. It does more than that, however. It may determine if the teacher candidate would be a good fit for that school community or not. As an administrator this would be one of the most important things that I would like to see in an e-portfolio.

Resume
A resume is another very basic thing that would be essential in an e-portfolio. Almost anyone hiring someone for a job needs to review their resume. It should be short and concise as well as easy to understand. This is not a place where you want to add lots of bells and whistles since they would get in the way of the content of the resume. For teachers, resumes are much easier to update when they are right in front of you on your computer.

**Lesson Plans**
The value of being able to put lesson plans onto a computer is immense. These lesson plans then can be shared very easily with teachers struggling with a lesson for that topic, substitute teachers needing a plan, and for organizational reasons. If a principle wants to get an idea about your teaching style it would be so easy for them to put a disc into the computer and click on whatever lesson plan they think might be interesting. This would be a great piece to include in an online e-portfolio.

Microsoft Office Documents
Being able to show that you know how to use all of the microsoft office documents can be valuable. Often, schools use spreadsheets to enter grades into a network system. If you show how you have used a spreadsheet to enter grades in the past, this is one less thing that the administrator would need to worry about teaching you. Powerpoints are also often used in classrooms as well as giving presentations for professional development and so on. Showing a short powerpoint presentation that you gave will show the administrator that you can work with that technology and are willing to incorporate that into your classroom or school as needed.

Video Taped Lesson
A video taped lesson can be useful for many different ways including: All of these will be important for the administrator to see and hear you talk about, giving them a sense of your teaching style as well as your reflections about how to improve, what you did well, or what you think didn't work. This lets the administrator get to know you a little better through your teaching.
 * 1) You can see the environment
 * determine how changing the classroom set up can facilitate learning
 * noises that may distract from learning (announcements, phone ringing, bathroom visits)
 * opportunities for "teachable moments"
 * 2) You can see mistakes that you make and be able to learn from those mistakes
 * assessing the amount of wait-time you use
 * solely focusing your attention on one area
 * 3) You can view numerous activities happening at once
 * 4) Allows you to experience the students ' view and reflect on your experience.
 * 5) Allows students to review each lesson at their leisure
 * 6) Provides an environment for peer-based reflection and personal improvement
 * 7) Web is not only a place to get cool stuff but also we can contribute to this cool stuff on the web.
 * 8) If you can connect with other teachers to evaluate and reflect on each other's lessons, this could be a helpful way to get other perspectives to improve your teaching.

VoiceThread: an alternative to the classic video of classroom instruction
One example of a good instructional practice that could be uploaded to an e-portfolio would be a student generated VoiceThread. In order to provide evidence of more than just the way in which I designed a creative project using technology, I would want to provide evidence of how I assessed such a project. I could show evidence of how I assessed a creative project using VoiceThread to provide not only evidence of student work but also my "work" of assessing and using my assessment to inform my future lesson planning. VoiceThread would provide the unique evidence of "real" student voice along with their approach and learning. For example, each of the students who participated in the project would provide their voice to the VoiceThread and discuss not only what they learned content wise but what they learned as a group and how this will improve their participation in future group activities. I would go in and grade the students' VoiceThread by adding my voice providing my comments of how I am assessing their work and how this informs my future lessons. I think uploading a VoiceThread that includes not only the students' voices discussing their learning but also my voice assessing the students work would be a powerful example of using technology for instruction. This would also provide an administrator with multiple dimensions of how I utilize technology in the classroom.

**Evidence of Student Work**
It is extremely important to show student work and evidence of student learning in your e-portfolio, whether the student work is scanned onto the computer, a picture is taken of it, or it is done on a computer in the first place. The student work needs to be connected to a lesson plan that is presented and it should be meaningful work. Accompanying the work should be an analysis of the work that the students did. It should reflect on why it shows the students' learning, what the students may not have understood, if there was a pattern of one or more topics where many students had difficulty understanding and so on.

Support Systems to Help Teachers
Showing that you are a member of a different online community to interact with other teacher can be something useful to include. It shows that you are already setting up a system at large to help give you some extra support outside of just your school. It also shows the administrator that you are willing to be a lifelong learner and are continually looking for new ways to improve your teaching. These are a few examples of communities that may be of interest:
 * []
 * []
 * []
 * []

**Extra-professional technology-based interests**
A common theme among many institutions today is the use of educational technologies to aid student learning. Teachers that can demonstrate not only professional use of technology, but also personal use, can have a distinct advantage over other applicants because they are constantly in touch with technologies. Expressing one's interest in the use of new technologies will illustrate the increased ability to perceive newly-developed technologies, and the ability to utilize a variety of available technological resources, as compared to someone that displays no interest in technology.

**Website Experience**
Many Schools now require that each teacher have a website that can be explored by parents and teachers. Many teachers simply do not have the technology background to compose and mantain a webpage, even a webpage with a template already created for them. It must be frustrating for administrators to pay for these websites and then to see some of them underutilized by members of their professional staff. Using a professional webpage demonstrates a teachers ability to take advantage of tools that are offered to them in order to provide more opportunities for their students.