Part of my action plan as an attendee of the GTA is to offer a series of free after school workshops for my teachers. On of the Tabs on my blog is the Teacher Academy which is my ideal vision of offering inservice to my teachers.
Unfortunately, the opportunity to make inservice credits is not available because of all the budget cuts we are enduring. I decided to continue the idea to meet my action plan goals, and because I really want my teachers to get excited and not frustrated about technology.
My first workshop will be Google Docs for Educators. I cannot begin to express how Google docs has pretty much changed everything I do in regards to documents and spreadsheets.
My premise is that teachers will gladly participate in professional development if you make it meaningful and convienent. My workshops will be only one or two a month, only one hour each, right after school. I have already had a great response to this idea at work and hope to USTREAM my first session so I: 1. can learn how to use USTREAM, and 2. Will have an archive of the PD.
Wow, all I can say is wow. A more cohesive post to follow
The Google Certificate says “Be the change you want to see in the World”. I can’t wait to apply this. One of the things that stands out for me is the Google concept of 80% -20%. All employees are encouraged to take 20% of their time at work and use it to develop ideas they are passionate about.
The whole concept of the Google for Educators was just a 20% for one google employee who felt an affinity for education.
So powerful and FREE! With all the problems the economy is having there is nothing that Google does not address!
Since Jeff Utecht’s post about reflection (that spurred me to invest more time reflecting) and the fabulous post of David Hamilton in “Principally Yours” about refelection I have been thinking a lot……about reflection!
I have been furiously ripping through my aggregator as of late to re-visit some key topics of Web 2.0’s impact on education and I found my self reading Mark Prensky again. I love Mark’s take on education reform (or the lack there of) and the change in the student mind. But what I found very interesting was this quote:
One key area that appears to have been affected (in regards to the effeciency of the teen hypertext mind) is reflection. Reflection is what enables us, according to many theorists, to genralize, as we create “mental models” from our experience. It is in many ways, the process of “learning from experience” in our twitch-speed world, there is less and less time and opportunity for reflection, and this development concerns many people.
It doesn’t just come down to adaption to digital the “shift” that our students are spearheading, but also reflecting on change. Better yet, we should be reflecting on the change in our thinking. Metacognition is not a buzzword to be thrown about to sound learned in a staff development session. Awareness of one’s own thought and learning process is a skill that needs demonstrated and modeled for our students. In my mind, the best way to teach toward the goal of metacognition is to practice the skill of reflection on our thoughts. The best way I know how to do this is to blog, and to use my aggregator to read the thoughts of others.
Observation of our learning process both individually and as an educational society is paramount to technology being transformative.
I just had to call attention to Kim Cofino’s last post on professional development. I was actually in a deep discussion today with several educators about the validity of professional development and how often is is transformative.
I really appreciated Kim’s Diagram of the network of Professional development. In essence it is mirroring what we do when we blog everyday. We are signing up for that personal learning time that is custom tailored for us
Oh my gosh I got chills from watching this. I saw this on Jeff Whipple’s blog, Jeff’s The Ideal Top Guy post dedicated to discussing the qualities that we need in schools for the 21s century. But in order to start that we need administrators who support and understand how technology should be used. No one is more aware of that than Chris Lehmann at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia. The quote
“technology should be ubiquitous and invisible” resonates with me on so many levels.
Is it bad to say when Chris mentioned there were admin openings that I briefly thought of uprooting my family to move back to my hometown of Penndel? Chris you are an inspiration.
Woot! I am in the Google Teacher Academy! I am so excited! I was on Skype with Jeff Whipple who mentioned two others that he knew of. So then I checked my Twitter and found a few more which led me to this site that was created not more than 40 minutes after they found out! I love the speed of Web 2.0! Now if I could only figure out how to join the site.
Well I am dying to go to this workshop. I know some colleagues who have gone and they have grown in leaps and bounds using the tools for Google Educators.
As part of the application we all need to submit a video no more than a minute long. The topic I chose was motivation and learning. The problem I had though was that I was not sure what to address:
My motvation?
The impact of motivation on learning?
Then came the content, I found a number of pictures some on wiki commons and others by a Google image search. I was dumb founded on what else to include. Since my topic was Web 2.0 and it’s impact on my motivation and learning I decided to use all my various dashboards and aggregator as images for the movie.
last week I had started a post that was inspired by Jeff Utecht’s post on Reflection time. Reflecting is an essential part of being a successful educator, but I find very often that most teachers (myself included) are often stuck in survival mode and doing just the immediate tasks rather than being proactively broadening their own knowledge.
I know when I get in a rut it is because I am doing a day to day survival, some how I have lost sight of the dreams and goals I had for my classes, I stopped investing and started reacting. Blogging is one wonderful avenue to reflect and also be proactive about my own development as a teacher. Before I became pregnant I would come home from work. take a seat on my couch and catch up with all my feeds and start blogging, or get lost in a sea of links and come up for air hours later with a ‘my head is going to explode from all the info’ headache.
I miss those days and I really believe in what Jeff was saying in his post:
Why is it the educators place a high value on the reflective process yet do not give themselves permission to do it during their own working hours? Every educator has prep time. We use that time in a multitude of ways, yet how many of us set time aside just once a week to take 30 minutes or so and reflect.
I have used a number of systems to try and organize my thoughts and time to become more proactive. Again it comes down to consistency in all of them. Since the beginning of the school year I have started employing the flylady system of time and CHAOS managment. I actually find her methods funny and relaxing. The most valuable thing that flylady has done for me is to give me routines. I have routines for morning, after work in my lab and when I get home.
I am going to add reflection time to my morning routine. I am fortunate enough where I have a Prep first thing in the morning. If I follow all my afternoon routines then that morning prep is a nice 40 minute chunk of time I can use to go through my reader and reflect.
I have the new task for an APPR project to get my 8th grade Computer class blogging, one of the biggest problems in working on this development is that I need to blog myself before I can preach the values of blogging.
It’s not about “competing in a global economy” for me…it’s about experiencing all that the world has to offer. I want kids and other adults to realize that there is so much out there to discover and explore.
Lucy was discussing the Global Education Ning network and a meeting that had taken place with other educators around the world. I would love for the blocks in my school to be removed and have my students have access to social networks being used in a constructive manner like Ning. All students should be exposed to the wealth of information in the Web 2.0 world, especially the students who never travel out of their city/town, or think that worldly exposure only comes to those who are privileged. I was one of those kids, I am grateful that I am more globally minded now, but I can’t help wondering how my educational experience would have been different if the Web 2.0 tools were available back when I was in school. (We didn’t even have the Internet then!)When I think about how much my life has changed because of the global mind set of Web 2.0 it is staggering. Everything down to the way I think has changed! For example on the personal subject of vaccinating my son- before I would use google or maybe a meta search engine to find results on vaccine reactions. I would filter through resources and sometimes be satisfied with the results but often I would be left with even more questions than before. Questions I would like to ask a person who has the subjective experience or resources I can use.
Instead I use my Netvibes to keep me up on new search results, where it all neatly gets filed under my ‘Vaccine’ tab. I use others’ bookmarks in Del.icio.us and share mine. Subscribing to blogs is just another way another way I start my research, but I also gain valuable subjective experience. To round everything out I usually post any comments in my New Moms Yahoo group where all our topics are neatly searchable for future reference. In many ways using Web 2.0 it is like having a ‘hive’ mind. (I can’t help the Star Trek reference) I can consume, produce and deliver more information now than I ever could, and none of my information is static, it is ever changing. Having access to people and resources around the world has completely altered my paradigm. I find News about the U.S. through other countries to get a varied perspective on the current state of affairs. Five years ago I doubt I would have even thought about the ‘lens’ that articles and News comes from, blogging has taught me to look deeper.
