Defining My Practice

Defining your practice
Before you can fully extend your practice you will first need to be able to define it. You can start your reflective journal by introducing yourself, articulating who you are and what is your professional community of practice. In order to be able to do this effectively you should consider the following aspects of your role:

• What is my practice?
• What is my professional context?
• Who are my community of practice?

Who am I?
As stated in the about me, my name is Kersty and I teach under Kersty Stephenson.  I have been involved in education since my children were little when I started at Lynmore Playcentre.  I realised that I had missed education since leaving school just before my 18th birthday.

What is my practice? 
I am a primary trained teacher who has taught in a Year 7-13 College for the past 8 years.  During this time I was TiC of Digital Technologies.  This is a subject area that I quite enjoy and have enjoyed sharing what I know and learning alongside my students.  This is a subject area which is quite vast in its own right.  Between the variety of applications, the workings of a computer there is so much to learn and know.  Further to this, I love teaching math and find it disappointing that so many students out there do not have a spark for the subject.  I usually see it as my challenge to change the students perceptions of the subject throughout the year.  I have also taught Food Technology and Social Science.  No matter what subject I teach I always try, to the utmost of my ability, to incorporate digital technologies into the units I teach.

What is my professional context?
Right now I am a student in two eLearning courses. It is unfortunate that with a falling roll that the school I was employed at has had to loose staff over the last three consecutive years. I enrolled in MindLab in November 2015 and started at Massey at the beginning of 2016.  I am hoping that I can take everything that I have learned into the classroom next year in my new town of Tokoroa. Yes, there has been a bit of change in my life, taking on full-time study, a new town, a new house. (one that requires a whole lot of work)..

Who are my community of practice?
I have two communities of practice right now.  One being MindLab, through the medium of Blended learning and Massey which is fully online.  Through Mindlab I am part of the Google+ community and Massey uses Stream.