Individual Professional Growth Plan Reflection

Individual Professional Growth Plan Reflection

Bryan Whitney

September 3rd, 2015

About a year ago I decided to create a Moodle for each of my French 1, 2, 3, and 4 classes for my Individual Professional Growth Plan. My goal was to create a Moodle for each class in order to provide extra support for my students, give them more choices in pace and in delivery method, place, and time. I also wanted to incorporate technology in my teaching methods so that students have more opportunities to be engaged when learning French. 

It was a lot of work as each week I created presentations for each of my classes. I use these to organize my teaching and to help students to have visuals and clear directions. This is particularly useful for students that are primarily visual learners. It is extremely important in French 1 and 2 because they have a very limited ability with the French language, and I try to create as immersive of an environment as possible. This is also very important for students that need a lot of structure and who have difficulties focusing. Not only that, but by posting the link to the presentation on my Moodles students have a place to go to if they miss class and/or want to review what we went over in class. 

Using Google Apps For Education (GAFE) has been very useful for me as an educator. One of my favorite aspects of GAFE is that I can use Google Drive to sync my files with my work and home computer, as well as create links to my online resources. The beauty of having links to my files on my Google Drive versus just uploading files directly to Moodle is that I can then update my files without having to then upload the new version of the file to the Moodle. For example, if I create a worksheet for a project on my Google Drive I can then get the link to the worksheet, put the link on Moodle, and later on if I update or change the worksheet in any way it will automatically be updated when students click on the link on my Moodle. This has greatly cut down on confusion for myself and for my students because as long as I use links to my resources they will always see the newest version and not an old outdated version. 

Also, I am always working to make improvements based off of student feedback and my classroom experiences, so if I am able to make those changes quickly and on the fly I don't have to worry about trying to keep track of notes of how things went, and then trying to organize them at a later date. One little trick that has helped me is that I created a master Powerpoint with all of the main activities that I do. For each activity there are instructions (often in both French and English) and in the note sections I include notes for myself on how I am planning on doing those activities (if necessary). After, or even in the midst of the activity, I am able to quickly make changes to the Powerpoint so that the experience will be improved for my future classes. It has been a much better process than just trying to keep track of sticky notes, which tend to get out of hand for me.

Another thing about Google Apps that I have really enjoyed this last year is the ability to collaborate with other teachers without being in the exact same location at once. Since we are all so busy and lead hectic lives it can be difficult to get everyone all in one place, but by using shared files such as Google Docs or Google Presentation we can create and update resources together. This last spring I worked with several other French teachers here in Missoula to create resources for a blended learning unit based off of a short beginning reader for French 1 or French 2 students. We shared files and collaborated using Google Apps which streamlined and simplified the process for us. 

On my Moodles I have included Google Calendar, YouTube, Google Drive, Google Sites, Google Presentations, podcasts, screencasts, videos, Quizlet, and other applications. I found that Google Calendar wasn't quite as useful as I had first thought. I felt like it was quite a bit of extra work to have all four Google Calendars updated everyday, and wasn't really worth it. I decided to have all of the information available on my presentations, which are organized by class and day. I also have a weekly calendar in my classroom on one of my whiteboards, so the Google Calendar ended up being superfluous in my opinion.

I was very excited about the Moodle quizzes at first. The nice thing about them is that you can create several different types of questions: multiple choice, True/False, fill-in-the-blanks, short answer, and essay questions. Plus, many of them can be graded instantly by the computer. This can save on a lot of grading time. Also, students can have the opportunity to take a quiz or test multiple times and get the best grade for their efforts. The drawback of the quizzes is that Moodle can be very slow when creating new questions, so it took quite a bit longer than I really wanted it to. I also tried to import questions because I thought that would save some time, but I couldn't get that to work correctly. Another snag that I ran into at the beginning of this year is that we had to move our Moodles onto a new server and update it to the newest version of Moodle. Because of that I wasn't able to transfer the quiz questions that I made last year. There may be another solution that I just haven't figured out yet, but that was a frustrating beginning to my year. But, another thing that I discovered last year was GradeCam, which allows you to create personalized bubble sheets which can then be quickly scanned by your smartphone or webcam to then be instantly graded by the computer. This is great for quick formative assessments. I highly prefer it to the Moodle quizzes, at least at this point in the game.

The biggest benefits for me and my students has been that the Moodles have helped keep me organized, and have made my resources more available to students outside of the four walls of my classroom. This year I feel much more prepared, and students have a place to go if they need to review what we went over in class, or if they missed out on class because of sickness or an activity. Because students miss class on a relatively regular basis it is very useful to have the Moodles up and running for them. This way we can all stay on the same page and my hope is that it will improve student learning and outcomes. I will definitely keep working with my class Moodles in the years to come.

Teaching as a Subversive Activity

Here’s a very interesting quote from “Teaching as a Subversive Activity” by Neil Postman & Charles Weingartner (1969). 

Pages 54-56:

“Now, if the “subject” is what is called “English”, the list of possible relevant problems is literally endless. For example, if one accepts the rather obvious fact that language is almost always produced by human beings for human purposes to share human meanings (the one exception to this is when two grammarians have a conversation), then the study of language is inseparable from the study of human situations. A language situation (i.e., a human situation) is any human event in which language is used to share meanings.

…in studying about how language works, one has available all the possible forms of human discourse to examine. So what do you think the focus of the “new English” is? Grammar. So help us.

Of course, we earlier alluded to this fact. But the question is, why is this so? Why have English teachers looked to grammarians for their opportunities? Why, of all the relevant and even critical language problems under the sun, have English teachers selected grammatical ones as the terrain for their students’ inquiries? In answering, one must try hard not to be libelous. But the fact is that many teachers of English are fearful of life and, incidentally, of children. They are pompous and precious, and are lovers of symmetry, categories, and proper labels. For them, the language of real human activity is too sloppy, emotional, uncertain, dangerous, and thus altogether too unsettling to study in the classroom. It was Kafka, we believe, who remarked that he could not understand why some people were so disdainful of “everyday” life since that was the only one they had. He must have had in mind the kind of English teacher we are describing.

Grammarians offer such teachers a respectable out. They give them a game to play, with rules and charts, and with boxes and arrows to draw. Grammar is not, of course, without its controversies, but they are of such a sterile and generally pointless nature that only one who is widely removed from relevant human concerns can derive much stimulation from them. Browning’s line that grammarians are dead from the waist down captures the sense of what we are trying to say about them.

What we are complaining about is the incredible fact that the exotic interests of these men have been put at the center of the “new English,” by teachers who are afraid to go where the feelings, perceptions, and questions of children would take them. You see, there simply aren’t any children who would have any possible reason- now or for the rest of their lives- to care about how a noun is defined, or what the transformational rules are for forming the passive voice, or how many allomorphs there are of the plural morpheme. And as long as we have English teachers who think there are, the “new English,” in its effects, will be virtually indistinguishable from the “old English.””

One of the things that I really love about teaching with Comprehensible Input and TPRS  is how we celebrate everyday life. Not only that, we take everyday words, objects, and actions and elevate them by using our imaginations and playfulness. It’s like how a child can find a million and one ways to play with a box.

It also made me think of how the impressionists and post-impressionists celebrated the quotidien. After that the surrealists look(ed) at surpassing everyday life and attempting to reach our dreams / a reality that is more real than what we perceive to be our everyday reality. I think that has something to do with what we’re trying to do in our classrooms (and hopefully our lives).

A little food for thought...

(This is not an apple)