Sunday, August 15, 2010

Growing and Learning

Each year I become more and more submersed in growing professionally on my own versus just attending the required hours of inservice training that was mandated by my school board. With everything online, archived elluminate sessions, u-streamed conferences, blogs, twitter conversations, etc I find myself gaining new ideas in my profession daily. This year I plan on doing two different things with my professional development.

The first one is that I have created a spreadsheet where I am going to document meaningful professional development activities that I participate in live or archived. I will also write a short reflection piece as to what I come away with from that reading, how it is going to change my thinking, motivate me to try something new, inspire me to share the drive with others. Hopefully taking the step to reflect on my learning will help seed my ideas and inspire me to implement what I have learned.

The second thing that I am going to try to own up to this year is managing a recommended professional development Netvibes pages where I RSS feed blogs and add other sites that I feel my colleagues would benefit. Teachers are so busy with managing all the students, activities, parents, grades, and more. I want to help utilize their time in a more efficient way by helping to bring recommended readings to them. Once they read the blogs they can continue their browsing through other links and sites if they choose or just read the bloggers thoughts and see what it inspires them to do. I hope to develop this site into one that has many categories so that they can steer themselves on the path that they are most interested in and will benefit the most from. I also hope that it inspires them to also begin reflective blogging by linking their blogs into the site and showcase to the other teachers their ideas and practices. I hope that visiting this site will become a habit for them and help them see the ease of blogging. Plus managing this will keep me up on my blog reading too!

2 comments:

  1. Hi Melissa,

    I just came across your presentation on differentiated professional development which led me to this blog. Good stuff.

    In your presentation you make reference to using Google Forms to document PD. Also, in the above post you mention using spreadsheets. Are these one and the same? I'm curious about how you plan on using Forms with this. I am currently looking for ideas to share with our faculty here. Thanks, Shane.

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  2. I use the forms to be able to quickly add what I have done, which then feeds to my spreadsheet. So, yes they are the same thing, but serve different purposes. If I use the form I have lots of pull downs so that I don't have to do a lot of typing when recording what PD I just completed. If I want to jot down extra notes, add links, maybe put down a thought where I could add what I have learned somewhere then I go to my spreadsheet.

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