Next week will be the last week for Computer Club (CC) at the buildings. It has given me a little more time with a few teachers this year to look at technology tools that could assist them instructionally, professionally and/or personally.
I will continue the Computer Club for teachers next year and try to coordinate the materials with Inservice and School Improvement (SI) agendas. Next year, we will actually have SI days that students dismiss at 11:30. This is compared to dismissing at 2:15 in the past few years.
Really we are still very limited on Professional Development (PD) time. 36 hours according to my calculations. Then you take away time for breaks (restroom and eating) and you have even less time. If this was just technology time, cool, but then you throw in RTI, School Safety, Curriculum, Classroom Management, Special Education, etc, etc, etc…
I am not saying these are not important issues, but I am saying we need need more PD time for all of these things.
I recently listened to a Podcast from Sylvia Martinez from a Online K-12 2007 Conference session, where she talked about teaching being one of the only professions where you get training and then go back to your job and are alone in trying to implement the newly gained knowledge.
Also Darren Drape in a recent blog entry that it is important that teachers could get involved with OpenPD. I attended the most recent session of OpenPD and found it very valuable, learning about wikis and blogs and how others are utilizing them. I also value the knowledge gained about the technologies utilized in the process of OpenPD with skype, ustream and wikispaces.
So between CC, Inservice, SI and OpenPD, I hope to reach more teachers with Technology PD next year.
Keep Learning and Sharing,
chris
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