Well this year has gone by in a
whirlwind; it feels as though we only just started the year, but here we are
nearly half way through! So far this journey has led me to some interesting
places, with much more to come. I am going to be honest and say that deciding
on how to spend the grant money was difficult for me; being new to the teaching
profession, and with limited contacts and a lesser sense of where teaching can
lead me compared to my experienced counterparts. My principal helped me to
think about my goals at this stage in my career and as an early career educator,
my main priority is to improve what I have just finished studying; the teaching
practice. I want to be the best teacher I can be, so it seemed fitting to put
some of the money into assisting me with this professional goal. So far this
year I have been able to fund my Masters degree in Gifted Education which has equipped
me with knowledge to bring back to the classroom on how to extend my students.
My school has also sent me to training for literacy coaching, which couples
well with some of the content from my degree. I aim to implement the coaching
and my Masters degree to extend those students who are boarderline 'A' students
into achieving their best. The grant has also allowed me to travel to Melbourne
just recently to attend the Hawker Brownlow conference with three other colleagues.
Here we were schooled in important classroom strategies from how to construct
effective student friendly learning plans, how to use Understanding by Design,
and the implementation of classroom differentiation, to the effective use of
music in the classroom. To say the least, I returned to school my head buzzing
with fresh ideas; now just to find the time to put these into place! I also
attended a workshop on using ICT, which blew me away when the presenter
discussed the future of ICT for our students. It seems hard to fathom such
exponential advancements in technology when we are such lateral thinkers, but
the reality is our students need to be ready for an information communication
savvy world, and what better place than to learn how to use this wisely than in
the classroom. This sparked my interest in ICT, and I have promised myself that
this is something I will follow up in my own classroom. Later this year I am to
complete a workshop that teaches educators how to use Ipads, which will be
useful for me to learn how to manipulate my new Ipad to its capacity. I have also ordered some visualisers and an interactive
classroom voting system for use in the Science laboratories. I am hoping this
will digitalise my students learning and provide them with innovative ways to
engage with Science. So, as you can see, this by no means is the end of my
professional development journey, but merely the tip of the iceberg, and I hope
to remain communicative as I continue my quest to being ‘the best teacher I can
be’.
