So, yesterday I attended a professional development course. For anyone who doesn’t know, if you are a teacher in Queensland Australia you are required to attend at least 20 hours of professional development courses. This really isn’t that much and is easily achievable. Especially since most schools run some kind of professional development internally. (I’m going to call professional development “CPD” because it stands for “continuing professional development” from now on to shorten things.)
This CPD course was enjoyable. It was called “Digital Technologies Curriculum & QCT Digital Portfolio”. It basically went over what Digital Technologies Curriculum meant and broadly what kinds of things you could do to implement it in your classroom. Being as I work for a school as well as managing a lot of the digital solutions for the school I knew I would find the subject matter relevant.
What I didn’t expect was to enjoy the QCT Digital Portfolio part as much as I did. Basically it went over something called iTunesU, which I hadn’t previously paid any attention to and how you could use this to update your professional portfolio. It was kind of funny as well because I rarely use my iPad, but tonight I snagged it as I was going out the door just because it is really great to take notes on and the speaker was an apple employee. This was also relevant for me in two ways. Because I have undergone the transition from provisional to full registration relatively recently (4 years ago) I have been asked to kind of talk to new teachers and tell them what it was like for me to go through the process. With iTunesU and the portfolio templates they already have created, this would be a much simpler and more dynamic process than what I went through when I did my transition. However, this wasn’t only relevant(I’m using that word a lot for some reason…) for new teachers, but also for teachers that want to make the transition to being a “lead” teacher. This is something that would interest me at some point, and if I could simply click a “share” button with an employer, that would be great!
This whole process, as well as a recent email I got from a parent has also rejuvenated my interest for developing a similar app for our school. However, instead of being for portfolios for staff it would be a portfolio system for our students. This would basically change reporting from a static reporting procedure to one that was more dynamic, interesting, and more indicative to the depth of the pieces of work a student does. One of the big features for the app they were showcasing was the ability to insert video as well as images. This would be great for showing student work, especially oral presentations.
The one major hurdle I see is that the professional portfolio for a teacher has just a few strands that need to be commented on. However, there are many, many, strands and content descriptors you would need for a single student, and that doesn’t even take into consideration that not all students are actually working at their year level requirements. So, the app would have to be more complex than the one they showcased, but it would fill a somewhat similar role.
Anyway, it was a good CPD and I immediately came home and started banging out some markdown so that I could feel like I was doing something constructive. Whether or not I have been at all constructive is debatable.
