Counselor's Reflections

Having completed the ‘23 things’ I feel I have been exposed to a range of useful tools and have developed a little bit more knowledge about how to use them in my professional working life and also for online social interaction.  While I have some way to go to be competent and efficient in using them I have at least gained some confidence thanks to the guidance provided with the weekly tasks.  Being very much a novice with many of the web 2.0 tools I am amazed at how I have been able to develop a few more skills and a little knowledge in such a short period of time.  I highly recommend the experience to others, no matter how basic their skills are  or how inadequate they beleive their knowledge of web 2.0 tools is.

The possibilities to create useful and  links with others in your professional area of expertise or social interests are obvious, as is the potential for the networks created to be very powerful.  The abilty not to be restricted of geographical boundaries in great.  My investigation revealed that in my professional area of counselling there is not a great deal available compared to other areas of education, so there is  potential to develop  network groups in this area.  One of the benefits is that membership could be resticted so that the network could be built slowly and by invitiation so that I am able to have some control as to who would be part of my Network in the early stages.  It could allow for some valuable and powerful networking within specific areas of Counselling, such as Middle School Counselors only, or Counsellors working in schools in rural settings, Counselors working in specific districts, International School Counselors etc.  It is possible  such networks do exist so perhaps further exploration on my part is required.

 Through my exploration of  classroom2.0  I found a potentially useful resource  for counselling, Challenge Software which is a computer based interactive resource aimed to engage students  in learning more funtional ways of interacting.  It is worth the look if you are interested in another potential tool to have in your couneling ‘tool box’. It is also useful for others educational professionals looking for alternative ways to engage students in developing more functional behaviours.

Raising the stardard or teaching instruction is a controversial topic. While some say that improving teacher evaluation is the key as pointed out in Evaluation Dysfunction, there are various factors that may contribute to improving the standard of teacher instruction that takes place in schools.

Getting real about teacher evaluation raises a number of aspects that would help increase the quality of teacher instruction.  While many of them are valid and additional factor that may help teachers is to create opportunity for more ‘team teaching’ and peer sharing. Often teachers have great ideas and strategies, but there is rarey time for colleagues to share their what they do well.  Once of the challenges of this is a reluctance on the part of some teachers to open their classrooms to others and to take the risk to expose what it is they are doign in thier lessons.   Obviously there still needs to be a trategy for some form of objective assessment, but ofter we can learn a great deal form those we work with daily.

May the offerts continue to come up with a strategy that provided an appropriate evaluation format which leads to further professional deelopment of teachers and improved teacher instruction.

The initial exploration was frustrating as some things I wanted to include as ‘pageflakes’ operate only if the made public, so at this initial stage various things were unsuccessful.  Also a few things I tried did not provide a pageflake option. Also I expreienced some difficulty setting up the ’pop email setting’ and there is not one for Yahoo, my main email provider. The search function is a little limited.  Pageflakes is great for personal stuff and I will certainly continue to explore it for personal use and try and build some useful pages. Playing around with setting up pages with flakes for me professional context could be useful.  There may be potential to set up Pages on various issues/problems that arise in  Counselling. Flakes related to differnt issues and problems and what may be done to overcome them could be created - but again how well  this could be done will require tiem and effort and may depend on what is available and how many flakes you can customise on each page.

Yet another useful tool. I like the potential for keeping documents and files in Google docs as it ensures you have them in another place, other that you own hard drive. 

Spreadsheets options could be useful for sharing student concerns with staff and allowing them to provide feedback.  This would not be appropriate for confidential information such as sensitive issues that arise in a counseling context, but useful for GLCs & Heads of Grade to monitor academic and behaviour issues.  Teachers could share feedback in their subject are on a Google docs spread sheet so that all teachers could then view how student are progressing in different subject or share what they find useful in motivating specific students. 

The presentations option could allow students or teachers to work on different sections of  the same powerpoint presentation and then each could easily see what others had done without having to email the document backwords and forward to each other. 

Students could also draft essay or upload it as a google doc and share it with their teacher (in edit mode), thus allowing the teacher to  be able add comments/suggestion and recommendations. The student could then act on these suggestions and improve the work -decreasing email traffic.

As I have now for some time You tube and Teacher Tube have an endless number of fun clips as well as some useful educational resources, music etc etc.  Pretty good search functions also.  It was pleasing to find a very positive affitimation of the work school counselors to which is obvioulsy great to hear as presented in this short clip. Still find it hard to comprehend that You Tube only came into existance in 2005 and has exploded.

An effort to generate a bare bones pod cast and embed it into a blog I think has been successful!  Thus completing Thing #18 and part of the stretch task – yahoo! Not sure how great the presented in the pod cast is, but it has perhaps planted the seed for something that may be very useful it devepeled further.

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Great idea already well utilised by millions – where I have I been living!!

In the area of counselling I could create seveal podcasts on a range of issues, from conflict with parents, dealing with difficult teachers, dating to break up, bullying, stress, helping friend in need etc etc.  Two to three minute segments on what to do, what to say, where to get help.  I could create  my own series, specific to the issues that are common in the  school or geogrphical location in which I am working.  Could be useful for me to research whether something such as this already exists and model my idea on this. Food for thought anyway!

An interesting concept, but I would be reluctant to share so many personal goals in such a public context.  It could be useful to use in an educational or team context in which goals set are limited to a class/grade/group of students or members within a team for example.  The members could certainly monitor each others goals adding encouragement along the way to help keep people motivated and offering tips as to how to over come challenges.

Sharing goals can be very motivating as it often puts the pressure on people to keep working at wanting to achieve the goal/s so as to avoid being considered a failure.   In some contexts it could act as significant motivation, however usaully things people achive do require a degree of intrinsic motivation rather the extinsic forces alone. 

A useful tool to be aware of.

Initial expereinces are mind blowing with regard to the capacity to search, tag, keep track of sites etc  and not have to have them ’saved on favorites’ the old way boo!  A huge advantage to be able to search other peoples bookmarks and related tags.  Found the expereince worthwhile for profesional use in looking for resources and also for personal use in looking for running information and training programmes for marathons.  Look forward to finding out other people who keep excellent bookmarks to assist with my search for relevant resources adn information. Please feel free  to check out what I have done in my intitial explorations and playing with delicious here .