Week 6 - R/D 11

While reading Chapter 27 (R/D11), reflect on what you perceive to be your own areas of strength and what competencies you feel you need to work hardest to develop given your professional goals. State and describe at least three competencies you’d like to develop and why. I do understand that most of you are school teachers, not ID&T professionals, but certainly there is plenty overlap between these different types of roles.

I believe that what I have going for me is first of all my desire to learn and understand some of these new applications. I honestly can say that I will be using them in the next year, and as I use them, will continue to look for ways to improve, or to integrate into other units. I also believe that a strength of mine is my ability to pick up these programs quickly. It isn't that I have a vast amount of history or experience with it, but it seems to come on fairly easily. My weaknesses involve time. It takes a lot of time to create a design for any given project, and unfortunately, that is a deterrent in doing it. That is something that I need to dedicate to and improve.
Competencies for development:
1. Apply current research and theory to practice. It is one thing to know about these applications, it is another to do it, and to do it well. I can say that I would like to set up a class wiki for my choirs for communication and information purposes...the issue is whether it will work, whether it will be efficient, and effective.
2. Update and improve one's skills and knowledge in ID and related fields. I do a lot of soccer coaching, and I have a team that does really well. I ask them frequently, "Do you think you are good?" Their answer is usually, "Yes." My follow up then is always, "Do you think you are good enough?" Their answer to that is "No." The point is that I can feel good about using some of these applications to improve my teaching, but I cannot rest on that. There is always more to learn, and more ways to get better.
3. Design a curriculum or instructional. My spring task this past year was to revise our schools music curriculum to meet state benchmarks. I already would like to revise it to incorporate more technology in it. I don't yet wish to design a technology curriculum, but would like to play around with it in how it can help in learning music.
4. Select, modify, or create a design and development model appropriate for a given project. This is fairly self-explanatory. My choirs often do projects following concerts. I would love to have a music technology project to use during those "down" periods.
5. Design instruction that reflects an understanding of the diversity of learners and groups of learners. This will be tough given that the skills have a huge range in K-12 learning, but this is a reason for doing it. Students need to see different ways to learn, and this can level out the evaluation as students strengths lie in different areas.