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Interview Dos and Don'ts

Interviewing is one of the most stressful events that a person will encounter in their lives.  It combines the fear of speaking in public or to strangers and the desire for the position that you are interviewing to get.  There are scores of websites, books, and seminars that promise to make you a better interviewer but the secret is inside each person.  As a former retail store manager, I have interviewed candidates for many positions from part-time cashiers to full-time assistant managers. The first big tip is to get comfortable with the skill set that got an interview.  Employers receive many applications for each position and only select a few to take to the interview step.  If an employer asks for an interview, that step has been cleared and the skill set is present to be successful in the job.  Many applicants forget that very important fact.  Too many times, the stress of the interview overshadows the step in the selection process that has already been cleared.  A second import
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Twitter for PD

Twitter is a platform that has really helped me as an educator.  When I was still in the classroom, I was in a district that did not offer much in the way of innovative technology professional development.  I started a professional Twitter account and spent time on it each day looking at different things people were doing in their classrooms.  I was able to start reading blogs and use all of that information to change the things I was doing in my classroom.  It became my place to go for ideas.  This was a few years ago and now Twitter has become a place you need to check for ideas.  There are so many teachers sharing what they are doing in their classrooms.  It has a wealth of information there for you to use. It is also a good way to connect with other educators to have discussions.  Twitter chats are becoming popular and are great ways to have conversations with educators that you might not get an opportunity to talk to on a regular basis.  There have been some great conversations
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Facebook Privacy

Social media is something that is a large part of life today.  It allows you to keep connections with people around you and these connections are important.  It is also important to control your data and the online social media presence.  It has now become part of the job application and interview process.  Many job seekers use it to look for connections and jobs in their area.  Employers routinely search for their candidates online and look up what they are posting online.  It is important to make sure that your settings are correct to make sure that you don't share anything you don't want to share.  You also want to make sure your profile represents what you want people to see and your picture needs to be something appropriate.  It is a good idea to have your posts on Facebook set to friends only.  That allows you to keep posts private by default.  You can change a post to a different setting while you are posting.  You also want to look at the different search settings and h
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Social Networks

LinkedIn has been around in the corporate world for quite a while.  It is not something that has really gotten any traction in the K-12 education world.  When I was creating my profile, many of the people that were part of the circles were not in the K-12 education world.  They were people from my time in retail or other connections that I have made that are not educators.  I have always seen the importance of social media in career exploration.  LinkedIn is designed to create work connections.  The way it is designed to focus on your career makes it better suited to work in the job market.  It has been specifically set up to create job connections to help fit people with jobs that want.  This stands in a stark difference to other social media platforms.  All other platforms have very generic profile sections that allow you to put in the information that you want.  Some prompt for a work history but that is more to connect you to people that you worked with than help showcase your sk
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Scholarship Writing vs Other Types

Scholarship writing is different than all other types of writing.  Each type of writing is very dependent on the audience for its structure.  Scholarship writing has a very set and distinct audience.  The writing is for an academic audience.  This means that the writing must follow a certain setup guideline and be written with a stated and specific purpose.  There does not need to be any figurative language, only a discussion of the facts of the paper.  The writer of a scholarly work has one purpose, to relay the findings of their topic to a larger audience.  This is the goal of creating the paper.  This goal dictates the type of writing and language used in the piece.  The language needs to be very clear and direct.  It needs to lead the reader to understand the premise of the writing and the data that either confirms or contradicts that premise.  Scholarship writing is a difficult writing style.  It follows a very set structure and must be clear to the reader understands that is bein
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Career Goals and Growth

Getting my master's degree was a goal of mine for the past few years.  The issue was always, what should I use as a focus?  I started my working career in retail management.  I moved up the ranks in several companies and did well for myself but never really felt like it was what I wanted to do long term.  That is what I really started working with students in a meaningful way.  I enjoyed that so I went back to school for 2 years to get my teacher's certification.  It was longer to go through a university but it was better for you career than an alternative certification program.  After a few years in the classroom, I was able to move into a computer lab to teach a new course, exploring careers.  I was excited and jumped into designing a curriculum that was totally on a computer.  I had heard of project-based learning and paperless classrooms but I had no idea how to create one.  I started taking assignments that I thought were cool and redesigning them for student-centered lear
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