Monday, August 30, 2010

23 Things for Professional Development in 2010-2011

We're back!! This summer, I was so incredibly bored and yet I did not take the time to accomplish anything career-wise. It was a conscious choice to unplug, remove myself from "the stream" for the entire summer and really feel disconnectedness. Well, I did. It wasn't really very fun, but I am pregnant and soon to be so busy that I can't remember what boredom felt like. Perhaps after this summer, I won't mind the frenetic pace of the coming days. One of the ways in which my school will be compensating for my absence is independently-paced professional development in technology. Most of us have heard of the 43 Things goal setting community. We are doing a version of that, 23 Things. I took the School Library Learning version and tweaked it for our purposes. They based theirs on the Helene Blowers Learning 2.0 version. I love the idea that it's self-paced and independent. Where I differ from some others at my school is the notion that each teacher's should be tracked on a spreadsheet. Maybe I just object to the tedium of the tracking process and get over myself. But I think my real issue is the babysitting issue. If it were a group of students in my class, would I track their progress or just look at the overall whole? Probably just the overall finished products and projects. Maybe that's not data-driven enough, too vague. Perhaps it's because I want to gift my fellow teachers with an experience over which they feel ownership. If someone is looking over their shoulders and ticking off marks, does that feel feel like their own project? Then again, if I was an English Teacher, I'd want to see rough drafts and outlines to mark progress and make suggestions. Like Wikipedia, I'd like the community to police itself. That's probably too Utopian. Someone's got to dream!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I have actually not heard of 43 Things before, thanks for the intro!

Forward!