Professional Learning Communities

During the summer of 2010, North Carolina DPI, CTE division, implemented the use of Professional Learning Communities (PLCs).  These PLCs contain a wealth of information, including course curriculum, updates from DPI, and forums where teachers can ask questions about the curriculum or share "best practices" with other teachers.

Since I helped to develop the Accounting 2 curriculum for the state of NC last year, I am currently responsible for answering content questions posed by teachers during the first (field test) year of the curriculum.  Once teachers have had a chance to use, review and pose questions about the curriculum, our team will convene in June to correct mistakes or enhanced/add to the material for release at the July 2012 CTE Summer Conference.

My thoughts on PLCs are that they are beneficial for several reasons: 

1)teachers from across the state are connected to each other and therefore feel part of a bigger community.
2)questions can be posed and answered quickly as opposed to the old way of contacting the CTE director of the LEA; having them pose the question to the regional director; who then poses the question to the Section Chief, who then contacts the curriculum team members.  The answer was sent down the same channels, and often took several weeks.  Now teachers get answers while they are teaching the objective rather than weeks after teaching it.
3)Best practices are shared with others, thereby helping our students learn in new ways.

The biggest drawback to these PLCs is that I sometimes get an enormous amount of emails about postings to the PLC for which I am not interested. :C

Snapshot of Moodle PLC forum for Accounting 2:

Birthday Party for a Five Year Old Boy

This week, my son turns 5 years old!!  Wow, where does the time go??  He wants a party at Monkey Joe's, which is a wonderful place filled with inflatables.  The kids literally wear themselves out climbing, jumping, and playing.  I think it is a great way to get kids to excercise without them realizing it is exercise.

For those of you that don't know about Monkey Joe's, check out this link:  http://www.monkeyjoes.com/

I will keep you updated on our party planning progress!

Technology - Friend or Foe?

Technonology - sheesh!!  I have literally spent the last 15 minutes trying to log into my Blog.  The problem is that I have multiple GMail accounts, and apparently Blogger.com is closely associated with Google.  Unfortunately, I created my Blog using my Hotmail account.  Obviously, this is not acceptable in the Google Master's eyes.

Originally, I created my Blog with my University email, which was a GMail account.  However, since my work email has moved to GMail as well, I confused Blogger.com when I logged in.  Additionally, Blogger.com told me that I did not own my GMail university account and therefore was forced to change to a new email account to log in.  Since I already have 2 GMail accounts, I decided to use the Hotmail account so as not to have yet a third GMail account. 

So, here we are, back to the log in problem.  When I typed the Blog address in the URL, I am asked to log in with my GMail account.  But Googlegod, I have a Hotmail account!  The Googlegod did not reply, so I had to figure out what sort of technology sacrifice I needed to give.  Obviously, I sacrificed my patience and sanity. 

To find the link to my blog, I accessed my instructors "GoogleDoc" spreadsheet, and opened the link to my blog that way.  What in world did I ever do before Google????

ECI 719 First Post

Welcome to my blog for ECI 719.  I adapted a blog from a former NCSU course, so all of the former content is still available.  I had thought about deleting it, however, I plan on re-reading some of the articles to refresh my memory of the other course.

I hope everyone has a terrific week.  We are finishing up exams at my high school on Tuesday and Wednesday, and will use Thursday for a make up exam day.  Friday and Monday are professional days for us to get ready for the second semester and the onslaught of new students.