2/1/09 Lecture 2.5

In lecture 2.5 we discussed a few things. First of we continued to discuss teaching standards. We looked at the difference between the Indiana Teaching Standards and the NET-T standards. In general they both promote teaching creativity and allowing the students to grow and learn as much as possible. The Indiana standards go a little more into depth on the actual content that you need to teach whereas the NETS-T standards talk more about how you can do so; saying to integrate technology and to use different approaches to teach different contents.

Next, we talked about professional development. Professional development is how we keep up with the shift. They discussed how we will continually need to learn and grow all throughout our careers; there will always be new problems in front of us that we will need to tackle. There are 2 types of professional development. The first is formal. These are more official things that are documented, like renewing your teaching license, taking college courses and going to seminars and conferences. These are things that are required to keep your job as a teacher. The second type of professional development is informal. This is development that is not documented or required. These are things like reading periodicals, new papers and new books. Technology is a great resource for informal development. We learned about things like RSS feeds. This is were you have one site that had all the new things from your favorite sites sent to it. Therefore you can keep up on the new news, without having to search a million sites.

The last thing we learned about was our E-portfolios. We learned why we are making them. We are making them to show our progress toward learning the professionals standards, it also presents and organizes our examples of our capabilities. Finally it gives us a way to reflect on our own work.

The lecture was very helpful and taught me some new things and ideas.