Welcome back to a new school year!

by Chelsey Trinklein, Chapter Historian

Recap of 2019-2020
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In case you missed it, earlier this year our KDP Alpha Epsilon Sigma (AES) chapter celebrated its 10th birthday! That’s right! The WGU chapter of KDP was installed on February 19, 2010 by Dr. Heather Dodds. We started with only 179 members and now have over 4100 members. On March 10, 2020, our previous board hosted an awesome virtual party in celebration of such a monumental event.

This last year, AES also participated in KDP’s signature service initiative Celebration of Teaching, led by Vice President Jessica Martz. This project recently received the Silver Award. Congratulations to Jess and her Celebration of Teaching committee! 

Coming up this year

Things are looking different for each of us as we begin our Back to School 2020. Some of us are back in the classroom and navigating best practices while social distancing. Others of us are completely online trying to make connections with students through a camera. Then some of us are trying to balance a hybrid. Teaching simply isn’t what we knew it to be or expected it to be. 

This year at KDP, we want to be here for you. To do that, we’re kicking off our first member meeting with professional development covering online teaching best practices.
For those of you who have already started fully remote or hybrid teaching, what is working for you? What lessons have you learned?

 Meeting Schedule

The 2020-21 meetings are scheduled for the following dates, so mark your calendars:

• Tuesday, September 15, 7pm MST
• Tuesday, November 10, 7pm MST
• Tuesday, January 12, 7pm MST
• Tuesday, March 9, 7pm MST
• Tuesday, May 11, 7pm MST

 
New to KDP?

I encourage you to browse Kappa Delta Pi resources here. There are both classroom resources and professional development resources.

My favorite resources page is the KDP Resources Catalog. Here you can browse resources by category or search for what is relevant to you. I like looking at the webinars, but the articles are excellent as well.

 Outside resources for current WGU students

As educators, we all have those go-to websites for classroom resources and professional development. I’d like to share a couple of mine.

LinkedIn Learning. There are a ton of courses. For example, they have courses on mindfulness, time management, and more specific topics related to business and education. Just use the search bar. I searched “lesson planning” and there are 170 results for videos and full “courses”. If you need help accessing this resource, let me know and we can try and troubleshoot.

Office 365. This gives you access to OneDrive and various apps specific to Microsoft. For active WGU students, simply log in with your student.wgu.edu account and you should be good to go.

Edweb.net. This website has a lot of educational webinars, which have state department of education approval for teacher re-licensure in New York, Massachusetts, Texas, Pennsylvania, Arkansas, Kentucky, Utah, and Nevada. As always, double check to make sure.

What are your favorite student and teacher resources? Share in the comments!