End of year summative self assessment

My principal sent us a document to fill out as an end of the year summative self assessment. I thought I would use the same documents here as a summative report of my year. Reflecting is always a good thing and I encourage you to take these same questions and do a summative self assessment as well. Can I suggest that we all use the tag: selfassessment07

1.What has been your greatest success this year? Have you been successful in meeting your professional goals? What specific examples can you provide?

My greatest successes this year include:

• Setting up and creating 30 middle school podcasts out of a total 34 school weeks.
• Setting up and maintaining our school’s blog site
• Maintaining and migrating (twice) our Moodle site to stay up with demand by users
• Propose and start using a school YouTube site to share vidoes created by our students and staff
• Set up flickr accounts for both campuses to use to share pictures with our community
• A successfully Tech Fest that included bringing in David Warlick to work with our teachers for a week.
• Helping numerous teachers with different projects including, blogging, podcasts, wikis, moodle sites, etc

My professional goal this year was to help SAS establish an educational web presence and to educate, train, and support teachers in the use of Web 2.0 tools and 21st Century Skills in the classroom. I believe I did meet my goal, could I have done more? Yes, but couldn’t we all. I’m pleased as I look back on the year and see what we have accomplished and more importantly to see the excitement that is building within our staff as they continue to think about their own teaching and learning in this new flat world.

Some specific examples of helping teachers were the International Environmental Symposium that was ran in our Moodle program and was used by 4 different schools and classes from around the world (I would link to it here, but it’s a closed Moolde course). The 8th grade China alive trip that saw the use of daily blogging, pictures and podcasts as the students were away from school for the week. Then there is the 5th grade team who I worked closely with as we made digital writing and reading part of everyday class through the use of blogs. Finally there is teentek.com my elective class that confirmed student produced content in an open classroom environment does work with some 32,000 page views and students writing because they have an authentic audience.

2.What has been you biggest challenge this year? How have you adapted your professional or personal practice to meet and overcome this challenge? Do you feel you were successful? Why?

The migration of the moodle site twice and the migrating to our new dedicated server was my biggest challenge this year. It was stressful and pushed me beyond my knowledge and know how. I adapted by relying on my research skills and personal learning network of like minded people to help me overcome and deal with these challenges. I feel I was some what successful. There are some bugs still to be worked out, and the look and feel of the site isn’t what I want it to be, but it is up and running and both students and teachers are using the system in the learning environment.

3.What has provided you with the greatest joy in your work this year? How have you found your work enjoyable?

My greatest joy came at watching teachers trying to understand these new tools and supporting them as they begin to make that shift to 21st Century learning. Some of the greatest joy has come in the last week as I have sat with a couple different teachers and talked about what they should be reading, thinking about, and playing with over the summer. I love supporting teachers as they start thinking about how they plan to design their classes to incorporate these new skills that students need.

My work is enjoyable because it is my hobby. I live and breath this stuff, I love researching, playing with and figuring out where education is headed next. I love being able to talk to teachers and say “How about this” or “Did you consider this” or “Let’s talk about this”. I love that teachers feel comfortable coming to me and that in most cases I can help them to embed these new skills into their teaching using technologies that they might not have known of or considered.

4.Where do you go from here? What is next for you as a professional challenge for next year? Look ahead and predict what type of goals you would like for yourself in the 07-08 school year.

Ah, the question..what does the future hold for me? This year has been amazing. I have had opportunities to do things I never thought I would do. I have met people and had conversations with people around the world that have pushed me and made me evaluate what I want professionally for myself. Next year my professional challenge will come from a new job, a job that was created out of the work that we have accomplished as a learning community the past two years. I know with this new job will come new challenges…I don’t know what all of those are yet, but am excited at the possibilities that are ahead as we continue to redefine education for the 21st Century.

My Goals:

• To continue the forward moment that was created this year with stuff. To affect education at my school and as a whole system in a way that redefines what it means to be educated, what it means to educate, and what it means to be prepared for the world after formal education.
• To take a writing class. I know this is a weakness of mine and as I continue to put my thoughts out there being able to write and communicate clearly is a skill I know I need to work on.
• To do more conference presentations and consultant work. I love presenting (over compensation for my lack of writing skills) I love watching peoples’ eyes when they have that moment (the reason I love teaching whether students or children) of epiphany like something I just said actually meant something to them.
• To continue learning. I love learning! I believe this is the reason why I chose education as my profession. What better place to learn than in a school.

It has been a good year, a year that saw nights that I was up until 3am working on sites because teachers and students depended on it. A year that I was Skyped in to a conference of 100s of people looking at me via a web cam. A year of conversations and thinking that is constantly redefining who I am and what I believe.

I thank you my Personal Learning Network for your support this school year…now on with the show. 😉

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