Personal Growth Plan

I found this post buried in my drafts. I'm posting it here as I wrote it last year, followed by a reflection on what I've accomplished.

October 14th, 2014:

After a profoundly inspiring #cdnedchat, I decided that I need to adjust my personal growth plan. Rather than keeping it to myself, I feel like I should make it public. So in order to keep myself honest, I've decided to post my goals here, and outline how I plan to achieve them.

1. Publish an add-on

This is a pretty straightforward goal - by the end of the school year, I want to publish an add-on for Google Apps for Education to the add-on store. I know what I want it to do (but I'm not going to give it away here), and I know what I need to do to get it to work. There are several sub-goals in here that get more technical, but I'll just give a quick overview of what this goal entails:

1) Learn a couple of programming languages (jQuery and CSS) as well as continue learning JavaScript.

2) Manage passing information back and forth between the languages.

3) Get a version of the add-on that works for me, personally.

4) Build up the code so that it will work for all users without needing to get into anything too technical.

5) Understand how to pass information back and forth between different web services. (done)

2. Help other teachers

I want to make sure that I devote some of my time to helping other teachers with questions I can answer. I've had a lot of help along my journey in teaching, and I feel that it's important to help others in any way I can so they can grow and share as well. We're all in this journey of teaching and learning together, and we've all got something we can share.

3. Learn from other teachers

I'm pretty handy with technology, but there's always so much to learn. I want to make time to learn from other teachers. This is going to involve the following:

1) Actively listen and engage teachers when they're sharing their passion.

2) Recognize areas in which I can improve. There are a whole lot, so this one should be pretty easy.

3) Ask good questions. Questions that have long, complicated answers. Answers that I'll need to think about, practice, and then reengage with others to continue learning.

4. #CdnEdChat

This one's pretty obvious - I want to continue to support and engage in the #cdnedchat twitter chat every Monday. There are a couple that I know I won't be able to make it to, but I promise to make a strong effort every week to attend, to share, and to listen and respond to ideas from others.

December 3, 2015

#1:

I'm happy to report that I published an add-on, and saddened to report that I pulled it off the web store after figuring out that it was severely hampered by some limitations I didn't understand when I wrote it. Birdfeeder works, but only for me, personally.

I have since published a couple other add-ons, in collaboration with Bjorn Behrendt. They actually work, too! My personal favourite is the Class Scheduler web app, which helps get those funny teaching schedules into Google Calendar.

#2:

Still working on this. I try to engage with educators through social media, to help them move forward. I've helped to organize Remix Ed, an ed-camp "flavoured" unconference, which I believe will help build up the local community of educators.

#3:

Same as above - I'm working on listening more carefully. I still struggle with this at times, when my brain is thinking of solutions before I've fully heard and understood the problem.

#4:

Cdnedchat is still going strong!