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Archive for June, 2012

27
Jun

FEP: Self-Examination of Three Required Areas & Two Elected Areas

For my FEP I chose to use a portfolio as means of assessment for each of the“REQUIRED,”  “ELECTIVE,” and “RELATED” areas that are evaluated. My professional blog: Freshmancomp.com serves as my portfolio and links to all the relevant parts are listed below in the FEP description. Enjoy.

To complete an FEP each faculty member must engage in a self-examination of “THREE REQUIRED AREAS”:

  • TEACHING (OR OTHER PRIMARY DUTIES).  For example, instructional or service delivery, content expertise, classroom or program management, instruction/program design. I will focus on content expertise. One of the projects I’ve been working on since transferring over to GCC is building ENG101 and ENG102 course shells and teaching guides for adjunct instructors.
  • COURSE OR PROGRAM DEVELOPMENT/REVISION.  For example, a review of syllabi, tests, and course or program content, including competencies and objectives. I decided to work on improving instruction in my online courses. The plan involves creating more podcasts (video and audio) and screencasts to provide additional instruction for students in the online course.

In addition to an assessment of these “3 REQUIRED AREAS” (RFP Section 3.5.3.1.) , “AT LEAST TWO ELECTED AREAS” (RFP Section 3.5.3.2.), and other “RELATED AREAS” (REP Section 3.5.3.3.)  may also be selected by the faculty member to review, in order to bring into better focus their full professional involvements at the college or within the District.  Examples include program coordination, research projects, department/division chair responsibilities, student activities-advising/mentoring, professional involvement in the community, professional growth, involvement/projects, professional interaction with colleagues, etc.

As a means of designing an FEP that is flexible enough to respect the broad diversity of the faculty role, a faculty member developing and implementing the plan should select ways of examining his/her performance that will most effectively describe his/her:  current performance, future goals and actions needed to achieve them, accomplishments in the professional areas to be examined, etc.  These may include different means of assessment for each of the“REQUIRED,”  “ELECTIVE,” and “RELATED” areas that are evaluated.  Examples of different means include checklists, observations, student evaluation instruments (which can be customized), student skill inventories, video assessments, portfolios, written summaries, conferences, etc.

 

24
Jun

FEP: Self Assessment of Acquisition of New Skills

In addition to an assessment of these “3 REQUIRED AREAS” (RFP Section 3.5.3.1.) , “AT LEAST TWO ELECTED AREAS” (RFP Section 3.5.3.2.), and other “RELATED AREAS” (REP Section 3.5.3.3.)  may also be selected by the faculty member to review, in order to bring into better focus their full professional involvements at the college or within the District.

This post will focus on an elected area: Acquisition of New Skills. Something about this requirement makes me want to laugh. I wonder if anyone has trouble with assessing their own acquisition of new skills. Would anyone ever say, “nah, I didn’t learn anything this year”? Just seems funny to me. I’m actually having trouble thinking about how to assess all the things I’ve learned in the past year. I guess the best way to explain it is to just say: Read my blog. Yep, for years I’ve been blogging about all the cool things I’ve learned about teaching and learning with technology.

And although I don’t blog nearly as much as I want to, I’ve managed to post 54 times over the past two year.Mostly I blog about new technology tools I’ve learned about and how I might or have integrated them into my teaching. One of my most popular series on my blog is when I blogged about saying goodbye to Blackboard. This was before we adopted Canvas. I’d had enough and figured out a way to teach all of my online classes in a WordPress blog. I blogged about the challenges and of course to benefits of taking that leap. Part 2 of that series was my 2nd most viewed post: Saying Goodbye to Blackboard Part II – Student Blogs & Privacy – 6,488 views.

I read extensively about teaching and learning with technology and follow numerous blogs online. My RSS feedreader gets used often on my phone, tablet, laptop and desktop computers. I love the Google Reader gives you stats. Check this out.

Now I’d say that is some reading. So what have I learned? I read mostly about Android, mobile learning, educational technology, and geek stuff. Below are my reading trends from the past 30 days. All but the first is related to my profession and interests in technology.

Take a look around the blog and I’m sure you’ll learn something. I post my weekly Diigo finds here as well. Essentially what that means is when I read some very interesting things or find great technology tools online, I bookmark them in Diigo and then post the best stuff here. It is continuous learning at it’s best with the system I’ve designed for myself. And the best part is it all works on my phone too, so I can take my learning with me where ever I go. Nice.

24
Jun

Diigo Links for the Week (weekly)

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

15
Jun

FEP: Self Assessment of Professional Development – Conferences & CyberSalon

In addition to an assessment of these “3 REQUIRED AREAS” (RFP Section 3.5.3.1.) , “AT LEAST TWO ELECTED AREAS” (RFP Section 3.5.3.2.), and other “RELATED AREAS” (REP Section 3.5.3.3.)  may also be selected by the faculty member to review, in order to bring into better focus their full professional involvements at the college or within the District.

This post will focus on an elected area: professional development, which Maricopa provides plenty of opportunities for, both inside and out the district. I make it a habit to attend at least two conferences each year. This year I attended InstructureCon in Park City, Utah. This conference was a great venue for learning more about the new LMS Maricopa has adopted. Many other Maricopians were in attendance and it was nice to talk to them about how their implementations were going and to see their great presentations on how they are using Canvas. It was also nice to be able to ask questions of the Instructure team for trouble spots I’ve experienced with Canvas so far. I attended many sessions, including Hack Night. But the most eye-opening experience from the conference was learning about LTI’s and how we can add tools to Canvas using them. LTI is Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) and they allow remote tools and content to be integrated into a Learning Management System (LMS). For instance, I learned that I could add WordPress blogs into my Canvas class using a LTI. Canvas has a list of current LTI integrations that you can explore for more added functionality.
Maricopa at et4online (19)The biggest professional development for me has always been my interactions with like minded individuals within the district and out. A few years back Shelley Rodrigo started a Maricopa professional development group called CyberSalon. We call it a grass roots professional development and several of us have presented about it at national conferences. Laura Ballard and I did a poster session at the Sloan C conference a few years back. Cheryl Colan from RIO designed the poster and Shelley conducted the survey.

Here is a quote that summarizes what CyberSalon is for one member.

“It’s a casual environment that is more conducive to sharing ideas with everyone instead of the information being delivered by one presenter. It’s a little like speed dating….at face-to-face meetings I can hop around the room chatting with everyone getting specific answers to my questions. I also like the group as professional development because knowledge and ideas are being shared by people in the trenches of teaching and not a presenter that gets paid for speaking to educators.”

I learned so much from the 80+ members of CyberSalon over the years. The way it works is we meet up once a month on a more social level and discuss all things related to teaching and learning with technology. Some of the meetups are theme based. We had one on Canvas and another on VoiceThread this year. We’ve also covered WordPress and gaming, but mostly the meetups are just free flowing – discuss whatever is on your mind. When we’re not meeting, some of us are blogging about technology on the CyberSalonAZ blog site, as well as our own blogs. And the meat of the group is the Google group where we share resources and ask questions of each other.

Since Shelley, the group founder, has moved on from teaching in Maricopa, several of us have stepped up to “manage” the group and keep things rolling.

12
Jun

FEP: Self Assessment of Asst. Department Chair Responsibilities

In addition to an assessment of the “3 REQUIRED AREAS” (RFP Section 3.5.3.1.) , “AT LEAST TWO ELECTED AREAS” (RFP Section 3.5.3.2.), and other “RELATED AREAS” (REP Section 3.5.3.3.)  may also be selected by the faculty member to review, in order to bring into better focus their full professional involvements at the college or within the District.  Examples include program coordination, research projects, department/division chair responsibilities, student activities-advising/mentoring, professional involvement in the community, professional growth, involvement/projects, professional interaction with colleagues, etc.

In this post I will focus on department/division chair responsibilities. First, I am not a department chair, nor do I ever want to be one. I’m thankful to have a great chair to work under, and somehow I ended up being an assistant chair along the way. In my roll as the eCourses coordinator for the English department, I started out being in charge of further developing the online program in our department. I watch enrollments and makes suggestions for adding additional online courses if all of sections fill up. In order to do this, we have to qualified adjuncts available and ready. I help faculty get trained and to develop both online and hybrid courses. I’m also responsible for mentoring and evaluating new online faculty. This past semester we decided to open it up a bit and get more adjuncts trained in teaching online. I’ve been working with 8 adjuncts and several full-time faculty on developing new online and hybrid classes. Our growth has been tremendous.

English Department eCourses Growth Over the Last 3 years. Fall 2009 – Total of 12 online courses – Don’t have the break down.

This Spring 2012 – 38 total online courses in the department

Writing Courses

  • 2 CRW170/CRW270 (Creative Writing)
  • 4 Developmental Ed Modules (1 credit each)
  • 8 ENG101 (Freshman Comp I)
    • 1 – 8 week
    • 1 – 12 week late start
  • 12 ENG102 (Freshman Comp II
    • 1 – 8 week
    • 1 – 12 week late start
  • 1 ENG111 (Technical Writing)
  • 2 ESL

ENH: English Humanities/Literature Courses

  • 2 ENH110 ( Intro to Lit)
  • 1 ENH242 (American Lit)
  • 1 ENH285 (Contemporary Women Writers)
  • 3 ENH291 (Children’s Lit)
  • 1 ENH295 (Banned Books)
  • 1 ENH235 (Gothic Lit)

Considering that we offer around 440 sections each semester this is roughly 8%. We’re at 10% with our hybrid courses added in.

We’ve added 5 more online ENG101 for this fall and 5 more ENG102’s for Spring 2013, although we’re starting to see a drop off in enrollment, so our growth might be slowed moving forward. However, if we need to continue to grow, we now have adjuncts trained and ready to teach new online courses.

As eCourses Coordinator I’m now responsible for book orders for all online courses, so I’ve done that for that last two semesters. I’ve been meeting on my own time this summer to work with faculty who are finishing up course development on classes they will teach this fall. And I’ve scheduled for technology training for our text book online supplement – Connect Composition 2.0. We had a session last week with 15 people in attendance. We have another training scheduled for July.

 

 

10
Jun

Diigo Links for the Week (weekly)

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.