Journeys in Education
Ramblings on ICT, Education, Web 2.0, Christianity and Staff PD
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High Quality Technology Professional Development
Q: How do you provide the time, training, and resources to keep up with today’s education revolution. A: Multiple opportunities, multiple modes of engagement tailored goals, vision looking ahead. Key has been every teacher having a laptop. Virginia has a teacher blogging initiative with each teacher having a blog. They have just intro’d a Ning for collaboration.
What kinds of training do they provide? Classes, Power blogging courses, ethics and cyberspace (every teacher needs to go through this course), Moodle, Google Earth, Using Inspire data, Podcasting, Inspiration and kidspiration. Details of classes here…
What are the goals? Awaremness of new tools and opportunities, Increse comfort levels and familiarity with technology, provide rationale for change towrds developing 21st century skills, change classroom practises, enhanced with best-in-class technologies.
Time is one of the biggest challenges. “money does not change education, time does. Teacher new to the system start one week earlier than the normal start to undergo ICT training. Lots of PD done through Instant Messengering. Weekly email newsletter, Technology Times blog and a podcast are the ways that they communicate to their staff. 1:1 help with teachers for iinstruction purposes not for fixing computers, after school classes from 4-6pm. Every year he meets with all of his teachers to set two technology goals for the year and to set their after school class. Summer term institue which take 2-4 days over 12 hours, mini conference days. promethean user group meetings, online moodle courses.
Top 10 Tips
1. Provide access, ensure the experience can be implemented right away
2. Provide a context and a theme
3. Provide opportunities for anytime anywhere
4. Model Innovation
5. Foster Collaboration
6. Maintain a conversation
7. Make teacher accountable
8. Provide Incentives
9. Use a Gestalt approach approaching technology as a system
10. Look at the results
Great work!!
In the newsletter actually did lessons, showed cool things, interviews etc.
Tech Times blog here..
PowerPoint of presentation necc2008_handout
July 16th, 2008 at 4:07 am
It’s kind of cool seeing your presentation so nicely compacted and summarized!
Thanks for blogging about it, and even more so for attending.
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July 21st, 2008 at 6:07 pm
Thanks for this. I have been following the conference via blogs and podcasts.This was a good summary of a presentation concerning an area I am interested in, teacher PD.
[Reply]