Four Easy ways to Revitalize your Professional Development

 Professional Development has been around for quite some time. Yet, have we taken the time to fully understand its full potential for our professional educators?   I think we can take our PD to the next level by implementing few changes with our current format.
Professional Development has been around for quite some time. Yet, have we taken the time to fully understand its full potential for our professional educators?

Build PD into the school day: Redesign your school day to incorporate Professional Development to take place during the regular school hours. You can at least use the time your staff arrives to school to the start of the academic day as protected PD Time. IF you are a Professional Learning Communities (PLC) district, you may already be doing this.

 

Tech Café: Embed technology Professional Development into the lunch hour. Here you can invite teachers to participate in PD while they eat lunch. Schedule multiple sessions during a specific date (Eventually leading to monthly Tech Café sessions). You can provide lunch for the staff or they can simply bring their lunch to the PD session.  Survey the staff to determine their technology PD needs. Lead learners can facilitate these sessions! Our teachers truly appreciate this monthly focus on Tech PD.

 

Edcamp style PD: Use the UN-Conference style PD for your building or school district. Organize the event based on needs, wants, and desires of those attending the professional development. Pre-determine the location and space for each PD session. Determine the length of each breakout session and decide how many sessions you want to have that particular day.  Allow for the participants to sign up to present on topics of interest. It will create an opportunity for teachers, technical support staff, administrators, and community members to lead out and facilitate relevant PD for your community. You will be amazed at the level of involvement with will create with your school community!

 

Host a Gallery Walk: This is great when you have a limited or set amount of time to work with Professional Development. Set aside PD time for your staff to share out in a 45 to 60 minute session. Pre-determine what areas you want to “showcase” or expand upon with your staff. Then allow for your teachers to move from “station” to “station” learning about the designated topics. Your staff can easily serve as the facilitator for the given stations. You can also use district experts to assist with hosting a gallery walk station.

 

By simply redesigning the format of our Professional development, you can accomplish two primary goals: 1. Create consumer driven professional development, and 2. Create a more authentic professional development for our staff and community. I am curious to learn what you are doing with your school’s Professional Development design!

Inspecting Social Media Tools

With the onset of Social Media’s meteoric rise to popularity and use with teenagers, it was inevitable that with all the great things that come with using, understanding and exploring Social Media for its positive purposes, we would someday encounter negative facets too.

As a father and educator I rely on Social Media for professional development, education, and connectedness. These two roles often merge together at times which require the blending the responsibilities of each together. This past Saturday (Feb 8^th) I was fortunate to be part of the #edcampSTL experience. This UN-Conference was incredible (to say the least). Eighty breakout sessions were offered throughout the course of the day. One particular session “Social Media How Kids Use It” caught my attention. What I learned in this session, I need to share you with parents, teachers, and administrators.

Last spring I shared with my parents some information about Ask.fm and how students are using this App. Ask.fm is a tool that students use to ask questions of their peers. The person asking the question can remain anonymous. Anyone can follow you or access your Ask.fm account to see what people are asking you. Just as important, they can see your responses. Personal, private questions are being posed to our teens. Now the scary part is ….they are answering these incredibly personal questions.

During the “Social Media: How Kids Use It” break out session, college Professor Julie Smith shared with us some of the other Social Media tools our children and students could be using (on a regular basis).  She told us that our students’ (and childrens’) digital footprint are really a digital tattoos!

Here are the iPhone Apps that she suggested we check out before our children started using them. Or if your children/students are using them, we need to have a conversation about the way they are using them. Here are several. I’ve given a very brief explanation and how to access the app via iTunes or their website.

·         BuzzE: Rate people with ‘stars’. iTunes App. www.buzze.com

·         HotorNot: Rate people via their profile picture/s.  http://hotornot.com/

·         Tinder: Meet people, date people. www.gotinder.com

·         Voxer: Voice/text/photo sharing. Location sharing too.  www.voxer.com

·         Whisper: Totally anonymous. Free to share information. iTunes

I will continue to share information as I learn more about Apps and websites that parents should be aware of. There are many, many other Apps that are out there. By being proactive we can work to keep current of the latest Apps of Social Media that may not be the best for our students and children to use. Feel free to share information on Apps that you feel parents need to know and understand.