Week #1 of Cedo565 Leadership and Planning

Before this week in this new class, I often though of leaders as those who are in the public eye.  The people everyone knows and goes to for things they need.  I didn't really consider myself a leader.  After reading the 1st chapter in our book How to Thrive as a Teacher Leader , watching Patrick Awuah's TED talk, and doing a few leadership surveys, I realize that I am somewhat of a leader.  In my job as a learning disabilities special education teacher, I am often taking on leadership roles.  I have taken on the responsibility to help others around me, whether I'm working with students or peers.  Although I don't get in front of the whole staff and "lead" very often, I am a go to person in terms of personal issues, work related issues and technology issues.  I have many people that value my input and turn to me if they need something.  I think this week has shown me that those virtues that I possess are very powerful and important to the people in my life and I am a strong leader because of that. 

Cedo 555 Blog #3

The past couple weeks there have been no classes, but I have to say, I was far from bored.  I have been hard at work setting up my portfolio for everything I have been doing up to this point in the cohort.  I didn't feel that the work these past few weeks was hard, however, a lot of time was needed to look back at what I did and determine what I was going to include in the portfolio.  I enjoyed looking back at my old work.  It really made me realize how much I have done in the past year and a half.  I can definitely say that before I started this program, I was unaware of a lot of educational technologies available.  It has been well worth my time to discover the new technologies taught in this cohort as it has helped me in my teaching career as well as my personal life.  I am looking forward to finishing my portfolio and sharing my portfolio with others.  I'm hoping the information I have learned can be shared with many other people.

Week 2 of Cedo 555

On to another week and now we are starting to get into the nitty gritty of the class.  This week we had to set up a Google site page that will act as our portfolio site.  It has been a while since I have worked on Google Sites, so it took a little time to play around and set up my site.  After a while, it wasn't too bad and I got my site set up with a home page and sub pages which will be used for sharing my work, my vision and mission statements, standards my work follows, as well as a page sharing a little about myself.  I am excited to see the end product, but know it will take a lot of work and time to make this site look good and be user friendly.

In addition to starting our portfolio site page, we also had to come up with a vision and mission for our site. I Googled to find examples, and that did help me, however, it was not an easy task to think of a vision and mission statement.  I made mine short and to the point, but I felt it was actually pretty hard to get a perfect statement down.  I felt myself brainstorming a lot. I honestly thought it would be easier to think of these statements than it actually was.  However, I am happy with what I produced and think both statements are powerful and do what they are intended to do.  If you would like to see my site and my mission statements, please click here   https://sites.google.com/a/wolfmail.stritch.edu/bill-raudabaugh-cedo555-w2012/home/my-vision-and-mission

Week 1 of Cedo 555

It has been a while since I've last blogged and now it's time to get back to work.  The new class I am starting is called Professional Portfolio Experience.   I honestly wasn't really sure exactly what I would be asked to do for this class.  Obviously, I have to make a portfolio, but I have never made an online portfolio before and was unsure of what it would look like.  The first assignment I had to do for class was to look for and describe online portfolios that would be close to something I would make for my professional life.  I think this assignment was very worth while because as soon as I looked at some of the examples, the goal of what I need to do in this class clicked with me.  I found four portfolios that covered a variety of subjects that I now teach.  I discovered that these portfolios typically shared the persons philosophy, and introduction of themselves and their work and examples of work they have used in the classroom.  After thinking back on all of the work I have accomplished in nearly a year and a half in this cohort, it looks like a portfolio would be the perfect way to share everything I have done and categorize all the work I have done in this short time.  I look forward to putting this portfolio together and looking at my peers work as well.

Week 6 of Cedo 550

This week concluded a very interesting class.  I have to say I most, out of everything we did,  enjoyed teaching an online course.  I feel confident that I could do this if I wanted to change what I am doing now.  It is a lot of work, but I think it would be fun and engaging as well.  As for this week in class, I really enjoyed the video called "Shift Happens".  It is a true wake up call as to where are country and children are at this point of time and it shows the importance of being technologically knowledgeable in the 21st century.

Week 5 of Cedo 550

This week was a fun week in Online Facilitation.  I was able to teach my 15 minute lesson on "Qualities of a Successful Online Student."  I felt I did much better than I thought I would do.  I asked many good questions and got my class to share some very good points.  I planned it as an interesting class and got a good grade on it. I think it gave me some very good experience for if I ever teach online in the future.

We also discussed social networking this week.  Overall my feeling of social networking is very positive.  I am part of an online community every day and have been for many years.  I  have been on Facebook since 2007 and really enjoy the opportunities I have to share my personal information and look into what is happening in other people's lives.  As a member of this Stritch Cohort, I also feel I have been in an online community that facilitates learning and sharing of knowledge.  I am very happy with my experiences so far.  


We also investigated the positives and negatives of working on a project collaboratively.  I feel a positive is the ability to bring many ideas together.  When you are only working by yourself, you are limited by your own experiences and ideas.  Have a group to work on a project together really opens up doors and makes your project the best it can be.  On the other hand, the greatest challenge of working collaboratively are those instances when team members do not work together well or there are personality conflicts.  Time is wasted because the members cannot come to a consensus and the product is not developed to the fullest extent.  


This week was a very interesting and useful week, and I continue to enjoy this online facilitation class.  

Week 4 of Cedo 550

This week we have focused on student centered instruction and differentiation of assignments.  Up until this school year, my teaching was very teacher centered.  I did a lot of lecturing and sharing of notes.  After going through Stritch, however, I have picked up a lot of strategies and have been changing the way I have been teaching to a more student centered approach.  I am putting most of my time into switching from teacher centered to student center learning in my Civics class.  The students are given a scenario and are expected to investigate the information, instead of me sharing every little bit of information with the students.  We still hold discussions, with me as the facilitator, but after the students have investigated the information asked of them.  I have also helped my team teacher in Life Science do teaching in this way as well. 

We were instructed to make an authentic assessment for our newly differentiated lesson.  I found that rubrics  really rate what the student is learning.  This works very well with the assignments I give in Civics class. I can honestly show where the student is based on what is expected of the student and what type of input the student put into his/her assignment.   I like the rubric I made because I can accurately see where they did well and were they were lacking.  It also shows them that I am stressing that they learn the content.  I do grade on spelling and grammar, but for many of my students this is a very difficult thing for them to master and I think it is a good thing for me to show them that their content is worth more than a few spelling errors. 

I really enjoyed learning about more differentiation strategies.  For example, for my civics assignment, I am now going to allow students to share their ideas in pictures and video rather than just text.  This small thing can help many students who tend not to be very skilled in writing.

This week has been very informational and I am looking forward to Tuesday when I can present my class discussion on qualities of a successful online student.