Candidates demonstrate continual growth in knowledge and skills of current and emerging technologies and apply them to improve personal productivity and professional practice. (PSC 6.1/ISTE 6a, 6b)
Reflection: During my time in the ITEC program, I have had the opportunity to attend the Georgia Ed Tech conference twice. Each time I've attended this conference, I came back to school with a plethora of knowledge to share with my colleagues and students. I was able to share my experiences and ideas with our instructional coach, administrators, and team leaders. Many of the ideas and resources I shared were paced in the technology improvement section of our school’s School Improvement Plan to address action steps leading to attaining technology goals for our school. This experience shows mastery of standard 6.1 because by attending these conferences, I learned about a variety of emerging technologies, instructional technology strategies, programs available, digital tools to enhance student achievement, and free resources. This is my favorite event to attend each year, and each time I go, I feel that I'm a stronger and better prepared STEM facilitator and instructor and that I am keeping up with instructional technology evolutions each year and bringing these innovations back to both my classroom and school, ensuring that we are preparing our students to become true 21st century thinkers and learners by exposing them to the latest and greatest forms of technology and bringing the world to our classrooms. By attending this conference, I also learned affective strategies to implement various digital tools and resources easily into classrooms. I learned about various strategies and programs utilizing technology that our school has readily available for our students, such as new updates and extensions in Google, iPad apps, and free websites. If I were to change anything about my experience at the Georgia Ed tech conference, I would ask for the opportunity to present all that I had learned to each grade level team during Thursday professional learning sessions. I believe that by doing this, I would be able to share all of the new tools and skills that I learned about with my colleagues in a non-intimidating and welcoming presentation. If I were given the opportunity to do this, it would directly impact school improvement and staff faculty development by promoting effective and appropriate instructional technology integrations to teachers at our school. They could understand that I would serve as a support person in their endeavors to implement the digital tools and resources that I presented. Also, the implementations of digital tools and resources from the EdTech conference would address many action steps and goals within the technology improvement section of the school improvement plan. The impact can be assessed by student products. The impacts can be further assessed, and improvements and adjustments can be made based on teacher feedback following the implementation of these digital tools and resources included in the follow-up professional learning sessions.