Reflecting on the ISTE Standards

In reviewing the ISTE standards and their indicators, I have noted that I need to work on standard four, Promoting and Modeling Digital Citizenship and Responsibility, and standard five, Engaging in Professional Growth and Leadership (ISTE, 2011).

The indicators that I particularly need to focus on in standard four involves working with colleagues and students of other cultures using digital age communication and collaboration tools.  One major reason for my lack of work in this area is the lack of diversity that appears to be in my area.  However, after working on my Walden University Diversity Requirement for my portfolio, I reflected and began to realize that there was more diversity in my town than I had otherwise realized.  My goal for this standard is to exchange and collaborate ideas with a variety of colleagues in my district, community, and in other regions of the country.  A few actions I can take to meet this goal is to network more with my colleagues in the district and online.  I know many teachers online that use Facebook to connect with other teachers to share ideas.  This is one tool I could use more effectively.  In addition, a colleague in our middle school has been asking if our first grade class would like to collaborate with them.  They would like to team together to work on an iPad project and have the middle school students teach my students some functions of the iPad.  Incorporating projects such as these are great ways to collaborate with colleagues.  Upon reflecting on how the project went, I can begin to branch out from there and discuss working with other grades as well.  While I don't see the race or cultural differences in others I work with, the Diversity Proficiencies helped me to point out that they do exist in my school.  By working with a variety of colleagues and different aged students, my students will be exposed to greater diversity and will be able to collaborate with them on a more regular basis.

In the fifth standard, I noticed that I don't often get together with other colleagues to discuss how to implement the latest technologies effectively in our classrooms.  In addition, I am not much of a leader in trying to show others how to implement it or answer their questions.  There are a variety of ways I can go about meeting this goal, but perhaps the best way is to start joining in conversations and committee groups with the other colleagues in my district.  In the past, there has always been a noticeable age gap between much of the staff in my school.  Many fear and stay away from any form of technology at any cost.  Therefore, I tend to stay away from some of them as we don't share the same viewpoints.  I have recently joined some committees in my school, and this week I have presented to our school board about iPads in the classroom.  During this presentation, I was able to show the board members the benefits of using the iPads, and they were able to ask me questions that they had.  I plan to join other committees in the district to begin discussions about the inclusion of technology within the school.  By reflecting on the discussions we'll have, I can note any progress I may be making.  I keep a binder with notes, post-its, etc. that help me keep track of what went on during meetings.  By continuing to keep notes of these new meetings, I will be able to reflect later on my progress.  Furthermore, next year I have been asked to start giving some trainings in how to work our Promethean boards.  This will help ensure that I extend my practices in the future to meet these ISTE standards.

Reference

International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). (2011). National Education Standards for Teacher (NETS-T). Retrieved from:  http://www.iste.org/standards/nets-for-teachers.aspx