My Experiences with PD...

...have been, as I noted in this week's discussion, less than ideal. I don't mean to sound negative, but I remember what it was like to be a busy, swamped classroom teacher who was at times less than enthusiastic to spend five hours learning about differentiated instruction...again. What I always really wanted (and was grateful for when my colleagues and I got) was time to do really focused work on my classroom needs, curriculum, even planning what would be best for our school community. Along with my colleagues I simply didn't want to sit and hear lectures about the latest educational theory, again.

For this week's assignment I chose a target audience of administrators, who can often be quite enthusiastic about implementing technology in schools.  I wanted to teach them about practical, readily applicable tools they could use right away. I thought it would be an interesting exercise for me to really deeply, fully explain Web 2.0 tools (making the assumption that my PD "students" were relatively new to them). I aimed to make an online mini-course that would take about 8 hours to go through. I chose an online course because these are online tools, so I figured people would learn best by doing. Besides, it's easy to get overwhelmed in a one-day course and forget all the stuff you're told, so I thought it would be nice for people to take their time and work in a self-directed way.

It was all going fine until I realized I had done no more than introduce blogs, and I was already five pages in! There are just so many details that need to be explained in order for "newbies" to really be comfortable. I realized that to do an overview of online communication tools (blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, photos, screencasts, podcasts, social bookmarking, and so on) would be an enormous undertaking - it'd essentially be the Module 2 of the course I'm taking right now, and probably far more in-depth than the assignment calls for.

It just kept getting bigger and bigger, so I've narrowed it down to blogs. They're a great starting point, they encourage communication and collaboration, and are even simpler than wikis. Once people have mastered a blog and feeling confident in their online application skills, I think they're much more likely to branch out into wikis and other tools. So the mini-course has morphed into being just about blogs (and Twitter as a sort of mini-blog). It's still lengthy - but I think the explanations and examples would be worth it for the participants.

Here's the opening blog post I wrote that I'd have them they'd read (blog name is LBS 850PD), and later in the course they'd add to it in addition to starting their own blogs.