Technology for Beginning Teachers

This week, a colleague and I begin teaching technology basics to a small group of area teachers in a "Beginning Teacher Institute" offered by Independent Education (formerly AISGW). There are only a few sessions and our task was to figure out what beginning teachers need to focus upon the most in their first year of teaching. We set up a grou.ps page to introduce the idea of developing a PLN and are posting our first day's lecture there. For the first time, I'm using Issuu instead of Slideshare. So far I'm impressed:

Open publication - Free publishing

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!

Distance Learning for Teachers

We have an inservice planned in March and one of the activities we'll do is participate in some kind of distance learning experience. Some of our teachers have already dipped their toes into the "online course" pool, but this is a way for the whole faculty to check out the resources available for professional development outside of the traditional top-down model. I have created a page on our professional development wiki with some resources for them and I'm reposting them here for ya'll. You're welcome to use them freely:

One of the biggest trends we see in education is the development of Distance Learning. This means, the learner is not situated in a traditional classroom, with a teacher or even with other students. Most of the time, the learner is in front of a computer, sometimes learning interactively at the same time as a group of other students. Other times, they are all learning ASYNCHRONOUSLY...at their own pace and in their own time.

Today, we will experience Distance Learning on our own. This requires the learner to be intrinsically motivated, because there is no one requiring you to make eye contact or look interested! You can often even skip to the parts that interest you!

Learner.Org (Annenberg Media)
Learner.org http://www.learner.org/ This site offers professional development across the curriculum. This is CONTENT SPECIFIC, not HOW TO TEACH. You can browse topics by grade and subject area. You will have to create a login, but after that the courses are free. You will be unable to complete most courses in their entirety, but can definitely learn a few things in our time allotted. If you're so inclined, you can even earn graduate credit!

Discovery Education
There is a new site called "Teacher Survival Central" http://www.discoveryeducation.com/survival/ that offers a lot in the way of new lesson ideas in video format. You can also view some of the professional development videos offered on the Discovery Education (Streaming) Web site here: http://streaming.discoveryeducation.com/professionalDevelopment/index.cfm Categories include:

Teaching Tips

Best Practices

Interactive Training (a good one!)

Project Demonstrations

Discovery Education Network.

Teacher Tube
This site hosts hundreds of videos related to teaching various subjects. Some you can use to learn from, some you can share with your classes. Check out the most viewed links, top rated, and featured videos on the home page. http://teachertube.com/

Video On Demand/Podcasts/Handouts from National Conferences
National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) Video Clips from General Conference Speakers http://www.nais.org/ac/ac.cfm?ItemNumber=149398&sn.ItemNumber=149439 And then individual speaker highlights here: http://www.nais.org/ac/eventdoc.cfm? ItemNumber=149909&sn.ItemNumber=149439&tn.ItemNumber=149910
NAIS 2008 Conference Handouts
Over 150 handouts from one-hour workshops and three-hour workshops are currently posted. http://www.nais.org/ac/eventdoc.cfm?ItemNumber=149399&sn.ItemNumber=149439&tn.ItemNumber=149511

National Educational Computing Conference 2008
You can view videos of various workshops and presentations at this year's conference. It's like you were there! http://center.uoregon.edu/ISTE/NECC2008/program/video_on_demand.php

Image credit: HB's Photostream on Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/84861681@N00/)

Judi Harris and Professional Development

A while back I mentioned contacting Professor Judi Harris at the College of William and Mary about how we might better manage Educational Technology Development at our school. A few weeks ago, my colleague Joan Jones and I finally made it there. Joan is our school's curriculum coordinator, so I thought she'd benefit from Dr. Harris' wisdom as well. It's not exaggerating to say that what we learned was profound. Dr. Harris is one of the most down-to-earth, yet engaging and well read persons with whom I have had the pleasure to work. She referred frequently to the Diffusion of Innovations model as a way to understand how all professional development/innovation in general evolves as it is implemented. What's significant about that is understanding that you'll only reach a small percentage at first, but then with time, others will adopt and that new skill or technology will be diffused throughout the environment eventually--excepting the farthest reaches, those folks called laggers.

We developed a plan for addressing overall professional development at our school based on a two hour conversation with Dr. Harris. She helped us to see that we must first begin by helping our teachers the same way we'd help students--by identifying the ways they learn best and by creating a common vocabulary for a professional learning community.

Steps:
1. Use one of our contacts at Organizational and Professional Development Services. This company has worked for the county in which our school is located, as well as on the state level. He specifically addresses learning styles, communication techniques and team building skills and change management.
2. Contact Judi Harris about speaking at our Inservice Day in Fall.
3. Organize Fall Inservice, including a long-term plan for faculty to demonstrate our long-term commitment to the process. (learning styles, communication techniques and brainstorming curriculum development themes). Possibly a survey?
4. Create committee for curriculum development.
5. Committee led by Joan conducts research (common vocabulary) about related curriculum themes suggested by the teachers and present to faculty at first whole-school faculty meetings after school begins.
a. Devise ways for teachers to engage with the new curriculum themes during the year.

I don't know how this will all go, but it's exciting to be around at the inception of a large-scale redevelopment process. We are hugely grateful to Dr. Harris for the time she spent with us.

Professional Development

Yesterday, I had a great skype meeting with the middle school technology director of the University of Milwaukee School. I wanted to pick his brain about his professional development program, especially as it pertained to technology and curriculum integration. It helped to reinforce two central ideas I have about ed tech prof development:

1. Ed Tech professional development is simply general professional development. The days of training teachers on software en masse are over. So much of what we do is simply part and parcel of the digital native's world that it necessarily pervades the curriculum. It should not be a separate subject any longer.

2. All schools regardless of money, space or staffing face the same issues of how to make professional development in general become an efficient, ongoing and daily experience for educators.

I'll be meeting with Judi Harris, at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va next month. She has spoken at NECC about Educational Technology Professional Development models. Ms. Harris has made herself available to me and a colleague for a couple of HOURS to discuss professional development models and how we can pick and choose from those models to shape one for our own community! Such generosity and spirit of sharing...

Her work, although I am only superficially familiar with it thus far, reinforces a lesson that is central to my growth as a teacher, as a wife, as a human being: there is almost no simple solution to complex problems. It's not a binary code. The best solution will be composed of bits of hands-on, small-group, peer mentoring, online and more. It's a postmodern solution for our postmodern world. I have to keep learning that over and over. Living in the gray zones.

Image Credit: www.yourgaragepros.com