Week 7 - Productivity and Professional Development

This week’s reading focused on technological tools that assist teachers to be productive, and tools that help teachers to continue to be proactive with professional development. Two of the main topics that caught my attention are communication and professional development. I have found that communication on a regular basis is one of the most important aspects of teaching, especially between parents and teachers. Regular communication with parents has helped me achieve great teaching results and has helped me enjoy tremendous support from parents. Clear communication is an indicator of a high level of commitment. Until now, my communication has been mainly via email, because hard copies of concert reminders and other important information never make it home. For instance I communicate regularly with parents the night before instrumental classes and remind them to bring their instruments to school. This has helped increase student participation and band retention. In the past, I used to forget to remind them until I started using a free reminder website called http://www.memotome.com. However, emails sometimes can be tricky. According to Bauer (2014) teachers need to be careful with the frequency of emailing because sending frequent emails “can begin to be perceived as spam, with the recipient quickly deleting them without reading” (p. 170).

After reading Chapter 8, I was happy to see other technological suggestions that may help improve communication. For example I did not know until now that teachers can create professional closed groups on Facebook. I am looking forward to exploring the Facebook close group feature because it might be a great tool for reminders and also may be utilized as a discussion platform for topics students learn in class. Also, a website sounds like a great idea, but the problem with it is that it may take some time to design one because it will require a great deal of extensive planning for its content.

As for the professional development, this class has been a great example of a master class that helps teachers bring new ideas in the field and utilize them for better and more appealing teaching approaches. I have recently been talking to some of my colleagues that teach music production in my district, about new tools and new project ideas that I plan to use this coming year. They are very excited to hear more about my music technology class experience. I personally spend many of my teaching hours utilizing technology to teach instrumental music, music production and general music classes. This class has been a real treat for me because it has been relevant to my personal interests. It has helped me to discover other web-based collaborative ways that will help me sustain my professional development for years to come. Blogger, Twitter, Facebook, Feedly, Edmodo and Google+ are some of the excellent tools that will help me make share useful teaching information with other colleagues and other teachers around the world.

References

Bauer, W. I. (2014). Productivity and professional development. In Music learning today: Digital pedagogy for creating, performing, and responding to music (p. 170). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.