Sunday, April 09, 2006

Professional Development 2.0

How rooted in the past is professional development for our teachers and administrators? We focus on using tools such as blogs and wikis with students in the classroom, but how could we use these in our professional development programs?

David Warlick got me thinking about this with his recent post, Conference 2.0 – 10 Tips for Extending Your Education Conference. In the post, David advocates for the use of blogs, wikis, tags, and the like to extend the conference experience. But how about using these tools to extend the professional development experiences of our teachers and administrators within the school setting? So often these experiences are like conference sessions – there is great enthusiasm during the session, but it falls off dramatically thereafter due to issues of time, curriculum, testing, and all the other things that our present educational system throws at us.

So I ask this question – In what ways are web 2.0 tools being used to extend the professional development experiences (in any area, not only technology), beyond the traditional? How can we best utilize these tools to support the learning of our teachers and administrators throughout the day and school year? I would like to see us shift from “blaming” teachers for lack of follow-through to thinking about how we can improve the system to encourage that important piece in the professional development process.

Posted by Randy on 04/09 at 12:07 PM
Professional Development • Emerging Technologies • (0) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
Page 1 of 1 pages