Experiences:
I am a high school teacher working in the Coquitlam school district for the last six years. I am currently teaching Skill Development (working in student services with special needs students.) I have also taught a fair bit of social studies (as my undergrad degree was in history) and planning 10, among a few other things. I am very lucky to have spent most of my career working at a school with a digital/technology focus. It is a 9-12 high school and all of our grade 9 and 10’s are one to one on a device (they all have a laptop or tablet and use little to no paper.) The program will expanded to grade 9’s through 11’s next year, and in the 2016/17 school year all students will be one to one. Our digital students all have an edublog account to showcase their best work and many teachers use them soon.
Outside of the classroom I am also a girl’s basketball coach. I coach at the school and also in the community. Most years I coach our Jr. team (grades 9/10) but this year I coached a second Sr. team at as our school’s program is so large. I am currently coaching the U14 Regional team for Fraser Valley North for basketball BC. After teaching, coaching, and working on my MET courses there is honestly not a lot of time left! When I can, I try to fit in a workout (swimming and biking are my favourites), reading (mostly historical fiction), and baking (mostly cupcakes.)
Individual Goals:
As a result of the layoff/recall process in Coquitlam I have an ever changing course load. In fact I have only ever taught one class for a second year! This means that I am almost always teaching something completely new, and I therefore it can be a struggle to really improve my practice, as many day I am just trying to keep my head above the water. I am laid off again this year and likely will be again for any least the next few years. Despite this I would like to not use this as an excuse and start a classroom blog or website. I have been working in student services this year and it as been invaluable to access other teachers’ blogs to help the students on my case load. When my students’ classroom teachers have update blogs it saves time and keep everyone organized. Since I likely will not be in student service next year, having a up-to-date and organized blog is my number one goal.
Secondly, I want to work on having more student work result in creations that they can share (publish online). I believe this will increase student engagement and the quality of their work. As an additional goal I would like to work on my own video creation skills mainly with the idea of possibly using them in a flipclassroom in mind.