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Some PLN Connections

On this page, you will find useful sites, expert connections, websites, and more that help me add skills to my teaching tool box.  Please dive into my PLN (Professional Learning Network) and feel free to follow these experts and websites yourself.

Websites:

Short description of the resource

  • This website helps people who are connected with CTE know more about policy changes, the up and coming jobs that schools are beginning to adopt in their training programs, and also has articles about important information for CTE educators and programs such as Common Core State Standards and studies and surveys that have been performed.

How did you establish/find/create/use this resource?

  • I found this website while looking for information on Career Technical Education online in my college class last year when we made our own PLN.  I really just stumbled upon it and since I did not originally teach in Career Tech Education, I had no clue about processes for adopting new programs, new legislation, or that there was a magazine I could get sent to me until I found this site.  
How will you benefit from this resource in your future teaching?
    • By joining this organization or bookmarking this website, I will keep up to date on the newest information and legislation that will affect my job and my students.  In my previous college class, I reviewed some articles that were on this website and talked about the application of this new study or research discussed in the article and how it would affect my teaching.  

Why I chose to Explore this Organization and how I will benefit from this resource:
  • I chose to explore this organization because I was never a career tech student, I was not training to be a career tech educator in college, but I was eventually thrust into CTE (Career Tech Ed) out of necessity (job layoff).  I always feel behind other teachers in my school who have their vocational certification and know their CTE standards and how they would teach them. For me, it is a shift I had to do in my teaching to think about how I could incorporate more English concepts into CTE, but I do believe it is very possible.  If I was to follow this website a little more, I might just be able to know what is the newest concerns, reviews, technology, or other issue that has arisen and be aware of how it may or may not affect career tech education and my job.

Social Media:

Link to my Twitter account: https://twitter.com/DebraWeberRaj

Having a Twitter account and connect to other "experts" twitter feeds is just like being connected to someone's blog through an RSS feed. It alerts you to new information when it is posted and you can view and respond to the posts, opening up possibility of collaboration.

    • Short description of the resource
      • This website is devoted to helping teachers understand and keep up on new information and trainings in ELA
    • How did you establish/find/create/use this resource?
      • I knew that someone within my district when they have given trainings before mentioned it and when I typed in English Language Arts on Twitter, it came up.  
    • How will you benefit from this resource in your future teaching? 
      • I will possibly use this connection on Twitter to find out about conferences that I could go to learn more information about ELA that I could use in my classroom.  
Blogs:
These would be places that I would check into periodically to find out more about my craft.  Since I work in CTE, I would want to know if there is any legislation that may jeopardize or change what I would do in my classroom.  These would be places that I would check into off and on, to find out what is going on but also allow me to comment and get feedback from others on the articles/issues that would be posted wherein:

http://ctepolicywatch.acteonline.org/


Newsletters:
National Writing Project: https://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/doc/resources.csp 

    • Short description of the resource
      • This website gives people information and strategies on how to teach writing.  They have many resources, publications, and much more on this site.  
    • How did you establish/find/create/use this resource?
      • I learned about this site through a PLN project I had 2 semesters ago with a classmate.  
    • How will you benefit from this resource in your future teaching? 
      • Teaching writing can sometimes get stale and it is because people don't know how to teach writing in a new creative way.  By going to this website, I can read studies or view strategies that I can then apply/use in my classroom.
Google Groups/Circles: 
    • Short description of the resource
      • This website is where new ideas, research articles, and announcements/good news is shared across the ISD.  This helps us not only help us hone our craft, but helps us create more self-efficacy and helps to build our colleagues' capacity.
    • How did you establish/find/create/use this resource?
      • Laura Robinson is a former colleague of mine that introduced this idea to us and since we are in her circle, we get updates every time she posts anything new and vice versa.
    • How will you benefit from this resource in your future teaching? 
      • I have seen some cool techniques or strategies that I never would have thought of before until it was put in our Google Group.  I am learning more tools to use, on my own time, and I can use them if I want to.  I also LOVE that it is free and I don't have to leave the building. 

More connections: 
4. Michigan Reading Association: https://twitter.com/michiganreading
5. Literacy Center of West Michigan: https://twitter.com/LCWM
6. Michigan Association of Computer Users in Learning: https://twitter.com/MACUL  
7. Mark Raffler: https://twitter.com/markraffler  
8. We Are Teachers: https://twitter.com/WeAreTeachers
9. Daily Writing Tips: https://twitter.com/writing_tips

Professional Blog #1:
  • Name of Professional Blog #1: Texas A&M Career and Technical Special Populations
  • Link to Professional Blog #1: http://ctsp.tamu.edu/blog/
  • Why I chose to follow this blog:
    • This blog related to my teaching and also had a blog post  about how to increase student literacy in the CTE classroom and provided strategies.
    • This blog also had an article which was about increasing collaboration, agency, and discussion between teachers to students and students to students.  
  • What I’ve learned so far from following/reading this blog :
    • I have come to find out that there are more places where someone like me (a transfer into CTE) can find more information about CTE, new legislation, and strategies for teaching literacy in CTE.  
    • This site not only has a blog but other valuable resources such as websites, instructional videos, and online courses all to help you teach literacy specifically for the CTE classroom.
    • This group also has a twitter page so if I follow them, then I could receive updates on posts they have put that may significantly impact my teaching.  
    • Despite this blog being from Texas and being about CTE instruction in their state, it had a great blog post about how CTE can save students from dropping out.  They stated that students that had 2 or more CTE classes had a graduation rate of 95.91 compared to other TX high school students. That’s quite a telling sign of how powerful CTE is but we have some schools that force their students into our programs, which messes up their credits for graduation, which makes us teach ELA while doing CTE classes, and then my class becomes the hated class and their content area class is the fun one because it’s “hands-on.”  
    • Despite there being some blog postings on increasing literacy in CTE, there was only 1-2 articles so far that have brought up literacy, increasing agency, or talking about college and career readiness.  The rest of the blog is about transition planning, important findings about CTE, and special education students (SPED) and CTE.

Professional Blog #2:
  • Name of Professional Blog #2: My Life as a Middle School Literacy Teacher
  • Link to Professional Blog #2: http://crazyladyteacher.blogspot.com/
  • Why I chose to follow this blog :
    • While I work in CTE, I thought it would be good to look back and see what some people were doing to foster critical literacy and higher level thinking in their classroom.  
    • When looking through the blog, I see some great creative ideas for teaching critical literacy and getting the students to look critically at the world around them.  
  • What I’ve learned so far from following/reading this blog :
  1. That real lessons that students can connect to could be controversial.  They are beneficial but teachers have to dangerously mingle with what could get them in trouble.  
  2. There are some other ways I could have the students present or demonstrate their learning.  On her website, she had book covers, lyric analysis, and other way to demonstrate called, “Heart, Hands, and Feet, “ which I am still to read more about from her blog posts.  It looks quite interesting.
  3. I have never taught an AVID class but it looks to me that they have better ideas and more creative lessons to get their students more into the subject matter.  I think I will use her methods to get more students involved in what I teach.
  4. I also was intrigued reading her blog post from Sunday, February 26, 2017.  She talked about losing boys in her reading program and her researching the male and female achievement gaps between boys and girls.  This made me think about what I see in my class which is of the same nature. More girls get into writing, speaking, and presenting while the boys shy away or avoid it at all cost.  It was both good and bad to see another teacher experiencing the same problems that I do.

Webinar Review:
 
  • What I learned as a result of participating in/watching this webinar and how I will apply my learning to my current/future teaching :
  1. Dr. Fisher mentioned that he had a website about his work with literacy.  I was really surprised that he said that people could send him messages at any time.  I think I might do this and see if he could give me pointers on what to do.
  2. Dr. Fisher talked about the difference between difficulty and complexity.  This was great for him to do because he states that difficulty is a measure of effort needed to complete the job whereas complexity is the thinking, action, and knowledge needed to do a task.  Also, when it comes to assessment, difficult assessments have 1 way of doing them whereas complexity is about how many ways the assessment task can be completed. This made me thinking back to my classroom teaching and my curriculum project, I began asking myself if my unit was complex enough or if it was just difficult.  Great point to bring up and such a great point to encourage self-reflection.
  3. Doug Fisher was talking about this matrix and what it would mean for us and our lessons.  He said that students do many skills in the fluency area but that should not be the only area they work out of but that should be the aim.  Teachers and students should aim for things to happen automatically. He was saying that something that requires stamina today with practice and more practice moves towards the fluency quadrant in order to free up the brain for other thinking.  His mention of this makes me think of the things I have asked for my students to do and now reflect on whether they were difficult or if they were complex.
  1. He mentioned 5 points he would talk about as connected to student learning and reading of complex texts.  He jumped off into each area after this slide. In looking at this list of 5 access points, it makes me think of our training that is going on for teachers on the 5D+ development model (evaluation tool) that focuses either on most of if not all of these areas.  I am excited for him to talk about it some more so that I can use it in my teaching next year to be a master teacher but also to help my students become better readers.
  2. He mentioned purpose and modeling and said that students should know what they’re learning.  This idea has been around for years and it is amazing that we still need to tell teachers to let the students know what they’re going to be taught.  The best point he made though was that the purpose of a lesson should be on learning rather than an activity, assignment, or job for them to do. Once again, he made me self-reflect on what I have done and ask myself if it has been for novelty or if the focus was truly on student learning.  
  3. I like that he brought up that when teachers have been had their principals walk through their classrooms for evaluation and ask the students what they’re doing and that students respond with a task.  He suggests that it should be changed to asking the students what they are learning instead and he believes that at anytime, students should be able to say what they are learning, why they’re learning it, and how they will know that they learned it.  I think that I will have to look at my daily learning targets and see if they are too vague that a student wouldn’t be able to tell my administrator these 3 questions.
  4. He said if you get the students reading a lot they will learn a lot and get better at reading. At my school, I have a lot of barriers to overcome with this point.  At my school, i have students in 11-12 grade who either can’t read, are at the elementary level, and others are at the junior high level along with them being a “hands-on” learner who came to our school to do the “fun” stuff and not the “boring” academics that I am trying to teach them.  How do I accomplish this when so many of our students are not able to read and if some people would shun the idea of their class having a fun fiction text to read in their automotive, hospitality, or construction classes.
  5. He mentioned how there is a difference between teaching a text and assigning a text.  He mentioned how his school teacher assigned Beowulf to be read by him and his classmates and she gave comprehension tests, but that she didn’t teach them how to look at the text and really understand it.   I got my teaching degree in 2008 after I had student taught in an English classroom and remember the HSCE’s used before common core and the list of “required books and readings” we had to use. Do we still have to use those books on the reading list from the HSCE’s or are they gone altogether?  Also, if there is a school that is still having students plow through all of those books in a year, how could they really do the close and critical reading that Dr. Fisher is talking about? Would it be permitted to just take one of the books or a book and use that to teach many to all of the CCSS standards for literature?  I’ve been in this position since 2012 and they changed to the CCSS since then, but I have been in a CTE environment and I am unaware of how things are working outside of CTE.

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