Last week Memphis City Schools started inservice and our first day of school was this past Monday, August 9th. I was asked to present Thursday at the World Language inservice, I was told I would be presenting about Performance Based Assessments in a classroom. Well, the morning of I was informed that I would be presenting to two groups of 100 in the high school auditorium. I have always been a little nervous about presenting but I am so glad I challenged myself and took advantage of this opportunity. I feel like I have really overcome my fear. This November I am presenting at the ACTFL conference in San Diego, CA with two other teachers and I feel ready to present now!
My principal is very excited about what I am learning in my program and he asked me to present to our staff team last Friday about a variety of different tools to use in the classroom. I was a bit nervous because I ended up being the last presentation of the day after a tough week where the teachers only had 3 hours in their classroom to prepare and get things ready. I highlighted some of the tools we have learned about so far, I even included Digital Storytelling. The presentation was a total hit and I have had teachers coming up to me every day asking for a one on one lesson or just commenting about how much they liked the presentation. I am pumped! Before I started this program one of my goals was to make technology spread like wildfire in my school and it seems like the fire has started! Now I just need to keep feeding the fire... We even have a new Title I coordinator who may be able to purchase new technology for us which is amazing (I am the teacher with virtually no functional computers to use in our school computer lab).
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Melissa,
ReplyDeleteI have come to the conclusion that there is a great divide between those who embrace the use of technology and really try to cultivate the skills necessary to be successful, and those who think technology is, at best, yet another crazy point of emphasis by administration. Part of the latter thinking could be due in part to the mundane and tedious presentations that are given during preterm in-service. The fact that you were able to implement skills that you learned from our readings is a credit to your talents as a presenter, and also an indicator that changing the way we think about presentations can produce positive reactions.
A while back, I had an opportunity to present to a group of faculty concerning the use of Google docs. Although I am by no means an expert, I was amazed at how little was known about this great tool. Fortunately, there were many great questions asked about why Google docs would be a benefit to any classroom, and I was happy to share what I learned in our graduate classes with the group. The excitement over this tool was encouraging to see, so hopefully we can close the gap between, as I said earlier, those who are willing to use technology, and those who are unwilling. :)