Tuesday, July 10, 2012

PD With Two Snaps and a Twist

Any In Living Color fans out there? Anybody? Maybe its just me. You may remember the PD With a Twist session I was lucky enough to present with Tiffany Whitehead. I presented a modified version at the Upstate Technology Conference with my buddies, Kristen and Monique. The librarians have become a major force in offering professional development for our district and we have done several unique programs, many of which are mentioned in the presentation. This year we were asked by our district office to put together more professional development options for our teachers.
Our 21 Things program was extremely popular last year so we wanted to do another self paced option. The only downside to self paced courses is a lack of face to face time so we wanted to have a more traditional option as well. Luckily I found inspiration from my PLN. I'm excited about what we are working on and feel that it steps it up even more than what we offered last year.
Our two new programs are Tech Flex and Level Up Tech Quest.

Tech Flex
I attended an AASL Webinar called "Tech Flex: A No Cost Staff Technology Training Program Organized and Guided by the Librarian" after seeing it advertised on Twitter. The webinar was presented by the librarian and assistant principal at Peter Township High School. They shared their Tech Flex program here. I was inspired. Kristen, Monique and I worked on a similar program. The flyer is below, designed by the talented Kristen Hearne. We are still putting the wiki together and hope to have something similar in organization to the TL Virtual Cafe wiki. Teacher presenters will receive a badge to add to their web page that says "I flexed by tech" and receive additional renewal credit hours.

Tech Flex Flyer
View more documents from khearne

Level Up Tech Quest
My PLN came to the rescue again for this idea. I'm participating in the Level Up Book Club this summer. During a Twitter chat, fellow book clubber and librarian, Aimee Bartis, mentioned a gaming professional development course in the works at her school. I had already been brainstorming a reading program with a gaming model, but had not considered it for PD. This was great! Using ideas from the book and the gaming aspects of the book club we came up with a professional development gaming program that would work for our school. Check out the flyer below. Our wiki is under construction, but you can see it here. To see the other ten challenges, click on Pages and Files. We're only putting the pages in the navigation tab when we begin that challenge to keep our teachers together as we progress through the year. We're going to use badges in Edmodo to reward our participants after each challenge. You can see the other details on the wiki and flyer.

Level Up Tech Quest Flyer
View more documents from khearne

I originally wanted to wait until the wikis were complete to blog about the programs, but I thought these ideas might inspire some of you so I'm sharing everything in its is current state. I wanted you to have time to think about it before school starts. I was inspired by others and hope that I can pass it on by sharing here. I would love to hear about the PD programs you are working on and if you try something I've shared here please let me know. My administrators are very impressed when our ideas spread. 

1 comment:

  1. this is really cool, like i didnt expect that, and tech-flex is really cool, it makes sense too

    ReplyDelete