Productivity and Professional Development

I found this week's reading on teacher productivity and professional development both reassuring and helpful.  I will admit that I lean towards a Type A personality (don't tell my husband I said that!) and I find a great deal of value in organization and planning.  There are several technologies mentioned in the book that I already use and some that I am excited to try:

1)  I have several Google calendars broken down into different "life" categories and then shared with the appropriate people.  For example, my home calendar is full of my non-professional life events (doctors appts, social plans, etc) and linked with my husband.  It is SO much easier to stay on the same page with our commitments this way (and it keeps him a little more organized, too!).  My professional calendar has all of my work commitments and is linked with both my husband and my other choral department colleague.  It is very convenient to have them automatically update on my smartphone and I often find myself using my smartphone to update the calendar more than the actual computer.  Next year, I would love to see this calendar shared with the entire music department, so we can see the entire calendar and better support each other. 

2)  I have just started using Google Drive to store documents, recordings, etc.  It is really helpful during the day because I switch classrooms every period.  We do have a drive at work that I can access from any computer, but Google Drive has been a great addition to that-especially when I am doing work from home and need it to appear at work the next day.

3) I do have a class website using wikispaces.  It is useful in posting materials, notes, and YouTube videos for my students.  I have not tapped into the collaborative aspect of a wikispace page and would like to look into that further.  I would also like to look into creating a music department website, geared more toward communicating with students in our ensembles.  This could include all the necessary paperwork (that never seems to end!), calendar of events, announcements, etc.  Along with this, we could also create a quarterly newsletter, which we currently do not have.  Together, this could be a much more efficient way of communicating information, rather than hoping that the stack of informational papers made it home to mom and dad.  It would also, hopefully, generate more attendance at our events and be a great way to advocate and advertise for our program throughout the district. 

When reading the section on professional development, I found myself really resonating with the following quote: "Professional development needs to be relevant to a teacher's personal interests and needs; it should be sustained; it is often social-we learn from others; and it can be formal or informal in nature" (Bauer, 2015, p. 175).   I think this quote resonated with me, in general, because it paints a picture of how professional development is supposed to be, not how it currently functions (at least in my district).  I am very rarely able to engage in professional development that applies specifically to my content area.  Instead, I sit in meetings regarding the school improvement plan, reading and writing strategies, and data walls.  I really long for more professional development that I can apply directly to my classroom and my students musicianship.  However, I did appreciate some of the PLN ideas (Google+, Facebook groups, Twitter) listed in the chapter and will look into how they can apply in my teaching situation.  In all, I thought this week's chapter was extremely relevant to my teaching and am looking forward to using more technology tools in my professional life.