It's Not Just About Ideas

The Why

Throughout the year, especially in the fall, students struggle with meeting deadlines and understanding how the admissions process works. When I was in my final year of high school, the whole process of college admissions confused me but luckily my parents had done it before and we figured it out. Others don’t have the resources that I had when it came to college admissions so I got inspired to see if I could create an Innovation plan to build an online platform to help with college admissions. I figured that I could create a professional learning presentation that outlines why a lot of the professional learning seminars and presentations are not effective so I can present it to my colleagues and counselors to see if they can provide some knowledge and help.

At Lamar University, which is where I work, we have our applications opened till August 1st of the start year. That gives ample time for students to get their FASFA in and settled before deciding where to go to college. I feel as an admissions representative that recruits students, that we can do more to help our students with the college admissions process. I ran by my idea by some of my colleagues and they are really excited about the idea and want to help me develop the PL presentation that we can deliver to the schools. We often attend PL presentations to help us better understand our jobs but a lot of the times the information goes out the window and we forget about it the next day.

According to Chada (Chada, 2024), College Admissions is broken. Yes, that was very easy to digest. Unfortunately in today’s society, we find that often the college admissions process is indeed broken. Chada says, “The admissions process is too opaque for students. From differing requirements and judgements between schools, to misinformation online, many students have no idea what colleges actually want from them (Chada, 2024).” There is so much that seniors have to go through to get admitted into colleges. Admissions officers like myself help a little bit but is that enough? We want students to be able to figure out the process for themselves instead of always relying on college fairs. Hopefully by implementing my Professional Learning presentation, we can help educators gain knowledge easily about the how to effectively present and in turn they can pass it down to their students in the future.

The What

Ensuring that my colleagues understand what I am proposing takes a lot of steps. One of those steps will be my google slides presentation below explaining the effectiveness of professional learning so we can all be well versed in the college admissions field. It will bring knowledge and understanding into the high schools and affect students in a good way. Embedded below is the presentation that I will provide to my colleagues and higher ups so they can start gaining better knowledge and I will be able to gather feedback on what I can do to help make college admissions easier.

The How

I decided on using google slides to do my presentation because it was compatible with WordPress. When I first started I had no idea what to do. So I first chose a theme and started building it and changing it to my specific presentation. I started with the first slide about why PL is so ineffective and designed it to my liking. Then I started building out the 5 key principles slides. I put the first three on one page and then I did the last to on the next slide. I did a conclusion page and then added the references. Once I had finished all of that, I started to add speaker notes. I did them slide by slide making sure I did the necessary research and finally I was ready to present it. I started the slide show and recorded my voice to go over the presentation and then put it on this post.

Below is the PD presentation that I built out to present to my colleagues at work. It demonstrates PD and how it can be successful.

References

Chada, S. (2024, January 9). Why Does College Admissions Feel Broken? Ivyscholars.com. https://www.ivyscholars.com/why-does-college-admissions-feel-broken/