Lessons+Learned

Issue: Not Having Time for Professional Development Plan
The original plan for week 2 had students doing an activity designed to get them familiar with blogger, delicious, and google sites tools in coming up with their own perspectives on concepts from that week's reading. On Monday of week 2 the lab activity for the week changed to having students do a webquest on the flat world. I didn't do the webquest and I think some other AIs followed my lead.

As a result of doing the webquest instead of becoming familiar with blogger, delicious, and google sites students started from zero when attempting to create their portfolio shell in week 3 and didn't complete the activity in the allotted time. This took away or eliminated time for the creation of the professional development plan, a key artifact in the portfolio.

I think we could avoid similar problems similar to this in the future by ensuring we look at how changes in one week will impact what's planned in future weeks. I was concerned about this but didn't speak up about it at our week 2 meeting and I should have raised the issue in some way.


 * RE:** Not Having Time for Professional Development Plan

I had this same issue with time and have had several other issues with time as well. Dealing with unplanned shortages of time is all about judgment. I, personally, don't believe in having my students do anything that they won't be able to do well. If I don't have time to properly model (and if I don't have a good tutorial to offer), I don't assign it. If I think something is disjointed from the rest of the lesson or won't get the proper attention for some other reason, I don't assign it. Quality has to be the issue. Pre-service teachers are all the students that were perfect students all through school and getting poorly defined assignments on too short notice traumatizes their need to instructor-please.

As time goes, there will be weeks where I WANT them to be a little uncomfortable with new technology or concepts so that they have to use tutorials. But that has to be clearly explained. It isn't an excuse for me to assign things just becuase I'm supposed to or just because its on the syllabus if I haven't set it up correctly. I'm sure there are alternative solutions to this. Some instructors, if they cant' do a great job setting up an assignment, still give it but grade it easier. Doesn't work for me, but works for some folks. Some set up the need for more autonomy than I do ahead of time. That works too.

Re: Professional Development Plan --Chip I agree with this last comment about not wanting students to do anything they will not be able to do well. My approach, though, was to intentionally carve out chunks of time, knowing that I was going to also tie the PDP into how i was emphasizing certain portions of the ePortfolio. The problem was, i sacrificed other things, like a few initial workouts in order to do this. I really like having the students do the PDP because it also promotes reflection, but it means that we have to have time to help guide them on this. i have found most students at this level really do not have great reflection skills, so this activity would mean making time for it. I think we need to think about the parts that we think are the most valuable, and schedule those, then do the same with the "next valuable," and so on. I think the solutionis not to eliminate the PDP, but to make a bit more room for it (a workout or two, maybe?)