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

I come to you tonight after several weeks of not writing an entry on my blog. I attended OpenPD this week learning from Sue Waters and others about blogging. I learned that it takes a committment to get your blog to be read and even though it may be read, you may not receive any comments. So Why? Why continue to write a blog?

I guess my main reason for plugging away at writing a blog is that if I write a blog, then I can talk with administrators, teachers, staff, students, parents, and community members about writing blogs.

I started this blog on Edublogs because I knew that more than likely I could keep edublogs from being blocked by the content filter at school because it seemed like it had an Education feel. I (we, Lindsey has taken over) started a blog at blogger.com for our family in order to keep our families updated on what is going on with our lives.

A blog can take many forms including personal, professional, hobby, career, memories, journaling, informational, opinion and can be thematic or can bounce from subject to subject depending on your desired audience. Learn from others how they blog or what they blog about by reading their blogs using a RSS reader such as Google Reader or Bloglines.

So I guess the answer to my own question, “Why continue to write a blog?”, is  just because I should and why wouldn’t I.

Keep Learning and Sharing,
chris

The annotations at the bottom of this entry are what I had highlighted using diigo toolbar on the OpenPD website. The “Topics” was a highlight and the “Welcome” was another highlight.

I will be participating for the first time this afternoon in OpenPD. I will share my thoughts and ideas about OpenPD at a later time.

OpenPD meets the next 5 or 6 Wednesdays at 4 pm Central Time.

Keep Learning and Sharing,

chris

—-Content below automagically generated from diigo—–

openpd » home Annotated

tags: Draper, OpenPD, PD, professionaldevelopment

• Open Professional Development Welcome to our collaborative space for this open staff development course. – post by chriswherley

Topics
Why Open PD?
Why Social?
Wikis
Google Tools
Yahoo Tools
Blogging
Social Networking

Welcome to our collaborative space for this open staff development course. We encourage all of you to utilize any and all resources posted here, use the discussion tabs to ask questions, post suggestions, and engage in conversation together throughout the course.