Professional Development Project

This is the scariest thing about the last MTT class for me. The thought of having to get up and present to a group of teachers is worse than working one-on-one with a teacher for the mentoring group. Thankfully, I had to bite the bullet and get this part of the course over with at the beginning of August. I was asked to present four sessions during the week of professional development for teachers at my new school district. Because I am a part of the curriculum and instruction team it was decided that each member of the team needed to start the year off by being a facilitator/presenter during the district's day of intervention sessions.

I was asked to present during four of the five session times offered. Since I am working toward being a Master Technology Teacher, I felt that my sessions needed to be technology focused. I came up with what I thought was a great title: "Using Technology to Enhance Student Learning & Engagement." I wrote a little blurb to accompany the session title and began planning how to use the hour and twenty minutes during each session.

Each session started with a survey to determine the participants' greatest interest. The survey asked about how much they would like to learn about any of the following: using surveymonkey.com, using Googledocs, using Edublogs for student journaling, and creating a jeaporday game template in PowerPoint. The survey results guided each session so that every session's focus was different. I showed the participants the survey results because I used surveymonkey.com for their survey. Then, I began working through session starting with the area of greatest interest.

At the close of each session, I had the participants take on survey about the session itself. The survey asked questions about the quality of the presentation, the preparedness of the presenter, and the quality of the handouts provided. A few days later, the district surveyed the participants too. Both surveys allowed me to see the strengths and weaknesses of the presentation. Overall, it was a great experience.