Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Nancy Curran
District. I primarily teach Honors and Advanced Placement Biology with my primary job
responsibilities to teach the standards outlined by the state of Georgia for biology and also the
technology standards laid out by the International Society for Technology Education (ISTE).
Strengths
My greatest strength is my willingness to try new experiences in my career. For the past
ten years I have taught Biology and each year I have tried to improve upon the previous in some
capacity by trying a new teaching approach or bit of technology that can help to make my
classroom more engaging. I enjoy the challenge of trying something new in order to help myself
grow as an educator and to better teach my students a difficult subject matter that can sometimes
be difficult to relate to. Having grown up in the technology age I feel that I am more willing than
most teachers to try a new technology to see if it works for me. I truly see the benefits of using
technology in my classroom to engage students but also to make my life a little easier. The more
seamless a technology fits into my classroom the more time I can spend working on creating
Science Education and has provided me with a great foundation in content. My Masters degree
importance of using technology to enhance the content in my classroom so that my students are
not focusing on the technology but rather the learning experience. Specifically the learning
Promethean, Smart, Microsoft Office, and website design. In the future I hope to be able to share
this knowledge with other teachers in the hopes that they will be able to incorporate technology
Weaknesses
I would have to say that my greatest weakness with regard to technology is my difficulty
technology has always come so easily to me I sometimes find it difficult to train teachers how to
use technology because there are some tasks that I assume to be basic knowledge when that is
not the case for all teachers. When doing technology trainings in the past I have found it difficult
to slow down my speech and gradually walk teachers through the use of the hardware or
software. In a survey completed after one of my trainings a couple of teachers mentioned that I
spoke too quickly and that I needed to slow down my approach. I do not want teachers to feel as
though they are being left behind during a training and I want to make sure that all teachers feel
as though they are being supported all throughout the implementation of the technology.
Opportunities
My administration has been very supportive in offering new opportunities to learn new types of
technology and they have consistently encouraged me to try new things in my classroom to
further support my students growth in both biology and technology. Already this school year I
have been offered the chance to attend two different professional development trainings that
that into even more trainings that may illustrate new ways to create a student-centered learning
environment in my classroom.
I also hope to be able to utilize the information obtained while obtaining my Specialist
degree in Instructional Technology. During the program I hope to learn new ways to use
technology in my classroom while also learning new ways to convey technology to the other
teachers in my school. I would like to take the opportunities that my program offers to learn how
to become a better technology coach at my school in order to help other teachers use technology
in their own classrooms so that they can create a student-centered learning environment through
Threats
load of students and prep work it became difficult to look for new technologies, familiarize
myself with them and take the time to appropriately implement them in my classroom. My
student course load increased over the years to a total of thirty-seven students in each of my class
periods. With that many students in my classes it was difficult to manage the grading and
classroom management required to effectively teach. During those semesters with increased
students I found that I would not take the time to seek new strategies for my students and simply
rested on prior strategies that had proven to be effective. Because I do not want my teaching
strategies to remain stagnant I feel that too many students, along with too many course preps,
Each school year I try to implement at least one new technology into my classroom to
gauge its effectiveness for my students. Over the next year my goal is to work to implement the
system and I found that there were certain limitations to the software that made it difficult for me
to organize my classroom and I also found that they types of assessment tools were lacking. For
those reasons I have decided that this school year I will implement Schoology into my classroom
management in the hopes that it will help to alleviate those issues. I am currently in the process
of transferring all of my materials and assessments over to the Schoology platform and have had
moderate success thus far. I hope to be able to continue to work through the growing pains of
this new software as the year moves on. So far I have been happy to see that my frustrations with
Edmodo have been alleviated by using Schoology and that Schoology is much more user-
Another goal of mine for the year would be to hopefully provide an additional training to
the teachers at my school to help them in the implementation of a new technology in their own
classrooms. Because I hope to someday be a technology coach for my school, I would appreciate
the practice and feedback of providing teachers with a technology training that could help to
I will continue to seek out help when needed from other teachers and technology coaches in my
school. I would like to participate in online trainings that could possibly familiarize myself with
PERSONAL TECHNOLOGY SWOT ANALYSIS 6
even more features of the site so that I will be able to share these features with my students.
Another course that I am taking this semester, Diffusion of Innovations, is requiring that my
group make a plan to introduce a new technology to a school. My group has decided to use
Schoology for this project and this means that I am researching even more features of the site to
potentially share with other members of my school. It would be wonderful if I would be able to
create a plan for my school that could hopefully encourage more teachers to use this technology
in their own classrooms. This project could also help me to achieve my second goal of providing
trainings for the teachers in my school related to a new technology. I would like to eventually
share this work with my administrators in the hopes that they will allow me to create a
management system that could help to alleviate some of the issues that teachers are currently