Professional Development

Professional Development Presentation Every teacher needs to know that they are not alone in the journey of learning with the rapid growth and evolution of teaching technology. There are many reasons for professional development, there are also many ways to do so. Professional development helps to network with fellow educators in any field. Networking is one of the most important reasons for educators to join the professional organization of their field. Members of professional organizations are getting a vast number of opportunities for research, and access to specific grants, awards, and fellowships, they receive prioritization of growth as a professional, and they can improve their leadership skills and teaching practice. ISTE – stands for the International Society for Technology in Education. It is a nonprofit organization founded in 1979, focusing on accelerating innovation in education with the smart use of technology (ISTE, n.d.). ISTE connects and empowers learners, leaders, facilitators, analysts, designers, collaborators, and other people who teach or learn how to teach (ISTE, 2017). Three different educational resources selected on the ISTE website for educational purposes are analyzed and presented in this project. 1. ISTE Blogs: Read ISTE’s Online Learning Collection provides a list of articles on different topics, including innovative trends in K-12 education, ways to support educator professional development during remote learning, hacks to balance teaching and self-care, and so much more. The one that is interesting to me is Four ways to support educator professional development during remote learning (ISTE, n.d.). This informative article is written by Mike Enders (2020) and incorporates pieces of advice to support any educator during their remote professional development (ISTE, n.d.). The first and second pieces of advice are focused on ways to develop easy-to-follow technology training and best practices to provide virtual communication or feedback. The other two recommendations are how to create and curate remote digital content and methods to remember self-care and student social-emotional health (ISTE, n.d.). Nowadays every aspect of education requires technical training, many of which can be done remotely at home. This article gives important recommendations or advice on how to make remote professional development more useful and productive. My students are learning remotely as well; therefore, the advice is relevant to them as well. The remote learning population of my students will benefit the most from these bits of advice. 2. ISTE Articles: Teaching and Learning News from EdSurge provides insight into the most effective instructional strategies for online instruction, and the latest news about teaching and learning in higher education. It is where I found an interesting article about How the substitute teacher shortage is impacting teacher professional development. (ISTE, n.d.). I am deeply impacted by the “special operation” in Ukraine, the work the Russian and Ukrainian departments do is doubled since the February of last year. It is extremely difficult to find a substitute to get time off from work. Pandemic COVID-19 caused a large shortage of teachers and substitute teachers nationwide. Prior to the pandemic, the Russian department instructors were quarterly scheduled for professional development. And now things are very different, last year we had only one workshop. This directly impacts educators, because we can’t be released from work to participate in our own learning. This issue has no direct impact on our student population, but vice versa, a large student population has a negative effect on educators. As a new calendar year, the student population should increase because several foreign language schools are starting to teach face-to-face. 3. ISTE Video Playlist: Tips for Online Learning is exactly what an educator needs to enhance their knowledge or get some tips for online learning. ISTE members are sharing their short tutorial videos, easy-to-apply, step-by-step instructions on how to make videos, or how to create digital drawing tools to enhance creativity in online learning mode (ISTE, n.d.). The Video Playlist: Tips for Online Learning contains a video tutorial on how to make videos accessible for all learners. The video tutorial is short, applicable, and very easy to follow. The video focuses on the importance of captions and subtitles. An educator can learn from this video that the video becomes far more effective for students with hearing impairment, so they can better understand the learning content. It is important to note here, according to Davies et. al. (2019), when audio-visual information is bounded it increases the development of the working memory span (p. 1). Working memory span is responsible for central executive functions, or simply for transcriptional skills, i.e., spelling. This resource helps me to include captions and subtitles when making educational video tutorials during curriculum development. This helpful information will help my students with hearing impairment. ISTE organizes and conducts many educational conferences. Many of these conferences are conveniently conducted online which helps all members-educators to come together and learn from our leaders, and form each other, how to develop competencies in the new digital world, and how to use technology in pedagogy. ISTE conducted a very interesting virtual DigCit Connect conference on October 22, 2022. The video recordings of this conference are available on the ISTE website. The conference included speakers: Richard Cullata (CEO of ISTE), Nicole Gill (moderator), Dr. Carrie Rogers-Whitehead, and others. The conference includes many interesting topics and subtopics on how to select educational tools that teach students to be good digital citizens, how to use images for digital citizenship conversations, how to lead students with equity and digital citizenship, how to establish a learning environment that fosters digital literacy and media fluency, and so much more. I would have loved to participate in the Giving Credit Where Credit is Due: Copyright and Digital Citizenship segment of the ISTE DigCit Connect conference last year. The segment was presented by Saul Duarte and Nelida Thomatis. Copyright and copyleft play an important part during the curriculum development process in my line of work. It is important to know the rules and every legal nuance with copyrights and attribution. It is interesting to learn how copyright is used as a digital tool, and how Creative Commons licensing works for educators because I use Creative Commons on a regular basis. ISTE recognizes the importance of higher education and offers a wide range of courses for future and current teachers using technology to transform their teaching and learning processes in the classroom (Reed, 2021). Another segment during the ISTE DigCit Connect conference was interesting to me, and I wished to participate in How Students are Using Social Media for Good. Due to my work and level of government clearance, I am not allowed to participate in any social media platforms but LinkedIn. Therefore, I know very little about social media and have a very negative opinion of all of them. The segment opened my eyes to how students are using social media to better their health, happiness, knowledge, success, network, and more. There are so many good aspects of social media that I did not know about. This segment was led by Laura Tierney and Adam Horowits. Many challenges of social media were voiced, and COVID-19 did not serve us any good during the worldwide pandemic isolation but knowing the “online drama” gives an idea to the listeners. Laura and Adam did an excellent job to give positive perspectives about social media (ISTE, n.d.). According to Reed (2021), ISTE provides teacher educators with perspectives and reports on the upcoming future events for teaching and learning in higher education fields (p. 1). I am hoping this presentation was informative and persuasive to you to join ISTE. References Davies, S. J., Bourke, L., & Harrison, N. (2019). Does audio-visual binding as an integrative function of working memory influence the early stages of learning to write? Reading and Writing, 33(4), 835–857. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-019-09974-3 ISTE. (2017). Standards for Educators. Retrieved January 30, 2023, from https://www.wcupa.edu/education-socialWork/assessmentAccreditation/documents/ISTE_Standards_For_Educators.pdf. Reed, E. (2021). A message from ISTE. Journal of Digital Learning in Teacher Education, 37(4), 214–214. https://doi.org/10.1080/21532974.2021.2008732 We are ISTE. ISTE. (n.d.). Retrieved January 30, 2023, from https://www.iste.org/