Professional Development Reflection

Professional Development is largely personal, what are some things you can do for FREE to improve your technology skills?

I will approach this reflection in two different ways: one way in looking how I currently approach improving my technology skills in my job since I am not currently a teacher, then I will discuss ways that I could possibly improve my skills if I was in a teaching position.

My current job working in an architecture firm as an interior designer requires me to use technology everyday, for almost every thing that I do.  Technology is involved in how we create our drawings, how we answer questions from contractors, how we manage the construction of buildings, and in our every day operations.  When I first started working in 2004, very little in our firm was done digitally outside of the actual creation of the drawings we do and answering emails.  We would hand write our phone logs, our construction questions, and the paper work we process during construction.  Not only was this very tedious, it was time consuming and created a lot of paper work to file that took a lot of space in storage.  Over the years, a couple of us at the firm took on learning new ways to organize the office using technology to bring us out of the dark ages and make our company more efficient and streamline.  We did research on how other firms use technology, experimented with different ideas we had using programs, and asked other people what they did.  We would also take part in luncheons that discussed changes that could be made to help efficiency in firms.  It has taken 8 years, but we have slowly turned our entire firm to an almost completely digital company including the addition of using iPads to remove the need to carry drawings and papers out to job sites when we do job visits. This has increased our turn over speed in office, and has kept us more organized and saved space.  It took a lot of extra time on our part outside of normal office hours to figure out what we needed to do and we meet a lot of resistance from other employees along the way but in the end it has moved our firm from one that was not utilizing the technology available today to one that has fully committed to technology.

When it comes to teaching and improving skills on technology, the biggest factor is time and when to learn how to utilize the technology, make it work correctly, and fit it into current lesson plans.  I think one of the first things to do, that is free, is to take advantage of the local library branch and look into resources and teach how to utilize different types of technology.  There are "____ for Dummies" books for almost everything these days, and there are several guides and help manuals to help easily talk through simply learning technology types.  After taking the time to read through the how-tos and the quick tips and ideas, I think next we have to remember that as teachers we don't have to be perfect and it is alright to learn with the students and make mistakes.  So pick a lesson two a week where testing out the technology with the students is a secondary goal of the lesson.  Talking to the students before hand that you are trying things out and that this will be experimental will probably make them excited about the lesson and could possibly lead you to discovery as the students may figure it out quickly and be able to help you.  The thing to remember is that students today have been using technology since they were about 1 year old so they are incredibly comfortable with trial and error and quickly finding out the answer were we feel like we need to know before we confront.  Finally if the above to ways have not worked, or you feel that you need more help before involving the students, look for peer support.  Ask other teachers in the school if they have conquered the certain technology yet and what they did to learn it.  Maybe see if you can trade of lessons on different things and help each other out.  You can also look on teacher forums and do internet searches to see if other teachers have posted how-tos on the technology you are trying to use.  While there are plenty of conferences you can pay to learn things at, sometimes self discovery is just as useful and sometimes more beneficial in the end.