Wednesday, January 15, 2014

PD from the Inside

Next week my school will be having a full day of professional development centered on technology integration.  We will have 4 periods of sessions before lunch and 1 after before people are given a couple hours to collaborate and use what they have learned.  Our main goal is that teachers walk away from this PD with something changed in their classrooms and ready to try out.

This will be my first full day PD that I have been an active part of the planning process.  In my role, as technology integration specialist, I get to help teachers in a smaller setting on a day to day basis.  I occasionally get to hold some meetings with our core subject departments but those only cover a small topic and provide a springboard to more interactions in the future.  This will be a day where all of our high school and middle school teachers come together and hopefully come away learning something that will positively impact their classroom.

I feel that we are doing a good job of modeling effective uses of technology for this PD day.  We have a Google Site setup as a landing spot that contains the links to the schedule, which is hosted on http://sched.org/ and is available on all devices including smarthphones, as well as a session ready on https://todaysmeet.com/ so that there can be a set backchannel for the day.  We will hopefully be able to use the comments and the chat to either change for next time or to set up resources that are needed by teachers.  We also have decided to use the #acsd hashtag for the day and are hoping that the Albion College Swimming and Diving groups aren't tweeting as much as they are the only ones who seem to be using that hashtag currently.  I have also highly recommended to people to not use paper handouts as there is no need since we have the technology available to use more than a piece of paper to help others.  I never understand it when I go to education technology conferences and see so many handouts or other pieces of paper being used when we have these great digital tools available that create better opportunities for learning.

As we have been working on this day, I have thought about all of those PD days that I have attended and how effective they were.  The most effective ones for me always allowed for choices and time to practice or create.  That was something we definitely wanted for our full day so that people had options to learn what they wanted and then to actually do something with that learning.  The worst PD I have attended consisted of a forced topic that took the whole day with no time to collaborate or create.  I will never be a part of that if I can help it, I do not feel it is effective and that it only detracts from the learning experience.

One thing that I am still thinking about is the chance that an unconference part of the day being effective for our district.  I wrote a blog post earlier this year about my reflections from EdCamp DSM and how I did not think it would be totally effective if not all teachers feel that desire to learn and grow.  There is always a concern that having a time like that will just allow some to either sit around without being productive or just give them a time to complain and not add anything but only take away.  I know that the Prairie District is trying it and I am hoping it is a success as I would love having EdCamp style PD someday in Ames.  Hopefully someday soon.

Monday, January 13, 2014

The Classroom Should be "Bigger on the Inside"

For Christmas my wife got me some stuff for my office at school, a bobble-head Sheldon from "The Big Bang Theory" and a Lego TARDIS.


First let me state clearly, I know that I am a nerd and I am proud of it.  I have a degree in Physics and my top hobby can be listed as technology, which is cheaper than golf lately.  The only shelf in my office holds my collection of my best fossils and rocks.

Having the TARDIS next to my desk got me thinking about how this can relate to our classroom.  (My mind tends to do this many times during a day, trying to relate teaching to something else so that I can further discuss or explore some idea.)

For those of you who do not know about the TARDIS, it is the time and space traveling ship of the Doctor, from Doctor Who.  Just last year I started watching it and got hooked immediately.  The TARDIS may look like a small police box but it is a lot bigger on the inside, something that almost everyone says the first time they enter it.

Now lets connect this to our classroom, which is usually surrounded by 4 walls and limited by the location it is in.  I have had 5 different classrooms in my 10 years of being a teacher and they all were different sizes and even shapes.  Some were big while others were small with a, very poorly placed, curved wall.  Proper technology integration into the classroom allows us to operate as if we were not constrained by the walls of our classroom.  We can allow our students to connect with others around the world, digitally visit places that are as different from their current location as can be, simulate the solar system and even the universe all while sitting at their desk or table.

Even when I had a small, curved wall classroom in central Iowa, I never felt like we only had to exist in that room.  Using Google Earth we were able to visit and explore all of the volcanoes and regions we were discussing.  We could see what others are currently experiencing or experienced in the past through video sites like YouTube.  We could view things as they were now or even in the past, and sometimes using simulations we could see what the future will look like.  We could even measure earthquakes that were happening thousands of miles away.  We could travel along the ocean floor, see where the rovers have been on Mars and simulate the night sky during the day so that we could better study the sky.  We could post questions to experts from around the world and get feedback before the next class period using Twitter or we could even create our own materials and have them shared with people around the globe.

We could even try to bring the past into the present.  I have read about how many teachers have had their students create Facebook or Twitter accounts for people who lived in the past and had them posting as they would today.  They had to critically think about the topic and content before creating something new to represent what they were learning.  You can do this without technology but there are so many more opportunities and ways in which you can do it with technology while increasing the effectiveness and engagement.

We have to view technology as our own TARDIS, a way to move beyond the limitations set forth by the 4 walls in a specific location and have a learning environment that is truly "bigger on the inside".