Re-thinking Professional Development

Photo by Sean MacEntee CC-BY

How do you train a teaching staff in the use of iPads in teaching? Or better yet, how do you help a staff see how their teaching can be transformed from a traditional model of instruction to one that leverages the power of technology to place the student at the center of the learning? We've begun investigating the move to a 1:1 iPad program at Divine Child High School. For those in our community who may have found this post we're looking at starting with only the freshmen in 2014.  So, we won't be fully 1:1 for a number of years yet. I've been asked to head up the whole program. My immediate goal is to make sure we have everything in place to ensure things go smoothly when the first class of iPads arrive in 2014.

Why wait so long? Why not start this fall? Inertia, it takes time to change practice. I want to get the staff development piece right. Step one, all of our teachers will have an iPad in their hands before they go home for the summer. Familiarity will go a long way I know, but where do I go from there? My assistant principal keeps asking me how many PD days I need next year. I really don't want to try working with a room full of 60 people at a time. That's a recipe for disaster.

My current plan, assuming I can get our administration on board, is to flip our PD and faculty meetings. I saw an awesome talk at MACUL this year by +Fred Sitkins and +Rebecca Wildman. They outlined how they've transformed professional development in their school. I'm planning on stealing all their ideas. You can find out all about what they've done on their site or in their iTunes U Course. I highly recommend checking them both out! You should also follow Fred (@fsitkins) and Rebecca (@rebeccawildman) on twitter.

In a nut shell they've gotten rid of traditional faculty meetings. Staff are expected to replace that time commitment with time spent working with their PLNs. Stuff that would be in a normal faculty meeting is delivered via video and teachers watch when they have time. PLNs find times to meet that are convenient and may be face to face or online in the evening. One member of each PLN reports out each month to the school improvement committee on the progress of the PLN. This is self directed professional development that is fully differentiated to meet the learner (i.e. the teachers) where they are!

The best part of this whole model is it is exactly what we keep saying our classrooms should look like. Not only could this be a more effective way of doing PD, it also models good teaching strategies to use with our students. The other thing I like about this model is it is rooted in professionalism and trust. It will only work if the teachers involved act like professionals and the administration trusts teachers to do their jobs. In the traditional model we try to ensure participation by requiring seat time in meetings. The problem with this is seat time does not equal participation. Compliance is not the same thing as engagement. It often looks professional, but that doesn't mean it is.

Over the next couple of weeks I'll be sketching out my plan on how to implement this form of PD. I'll try to share my thoughts here as I move forward.

iBooks Presentations from #MACUL13

I think I may have finally recovered from the Michigan Association for Computer Users in Learning annual conference. As usual I was pretty busy. I ended up being involved in two different presentations, which always take a lot out of me.

Both of the presentations I was involved in were focused on the use of iBooks Author to create textbook replacements. Yes, I understand this limits me to the iPad only, but really, I don't care. I thought I'd post a quick summary including links from both talks.

Innovating with iBooks Author and Pages

This was a talk I gave with my very good friend Serge Danielson-Francois (Library Ninja). Serge and I complement each other perfectly. I tend to be frenetic and get going on an idea with a focus that can sometimes get me way off agenda. Serge on the other hand always has the long view and can help keep things moving in the right direction.

Anyway, I typically don't use PowerPoint or an alternative. I tend to present from an outline and jump between webpages and applications. You can find our complete outline and all of our links on the Google Site I set up for the presentation. When we both started the year we had a vision of how we'd use iBooks Author and what our "textbooks" would look like. This really became an exercise in reflection on our teaching. We shared our original vision and then how this has changed over the course of the year. If you'd like to see the original vision you can check out an article we wrote for the MACUL Journal, look on page 26.

Serge's vision changed the most. He originally envisioned having his journalism 2 and 3 students create a textbook for his first year students. Awesome idea! However, he's learned that journalism today is a moving target and those things that don't change rapidly are things his students would have difficulty teaching. Things like avoiding the easy headline and digging deeper to the real story. In short how to think like a journalist. He now sees his students creating a portfolio of how stories were covered this year. It will be more of a resource for the future editors of the school's online paper.

Join the iBooks Author Collaborative

I was a co-presenter with Tony DiLaura, a great guy from Zeeland Public Schools. This was the kickoff session for the upcoming iBooks Hackathon! In June we will be inviting teachers to come and learn iBooks Author and hopefully partner up with other educators to create high quality resources for use by students around the state (and beyond). We will be running basically the same session on both sides of the state. On the west side of the state we will be hosted by Kent ISD and on the east side by Wayne State University.

What we really want to do is get teachers working together collaboratively to create pieces of iBooks. This could be good text, graphics, interactive widgets, videos or other cool stuff I haven't thought of. All of these pieces could be then archived in a way that other people could take them and create custom books for their own students. However, we're running this as more of an edcamp like idea, so if our participants have a different vison then we'll go in a different direction. The big ideas are:

• Create resource to support the way individual teachers teach
• Collaboration: "Many hands make light work"
• Collaboration: Lets learn from each other. I would love to find someone who could teach me new skills or offer me better ways to reach my students.
• Share what we've made: If what I do will help other educators that would be great. I know I have skills that others don't. If I make my stuff available then they don't have to have those skills.

Interested? Wondering how you can get involved?

1. Goto our Hackathon Website for more information and to register. We are charging $30 because the number of people we can accomodate is limited and we want to help ensure those that register actually show up. (plus we're providing lunch)
2. Join our Google+ Community. We currently have people from around the state and as well as other people who've found us.

iBooks Hackathon

I've already written a bit about iBooks Author and how awesome it is for creating resources to share with your students. I know some of you are probably rolling your eyes about now and thinking something along the lines of, "More iPads in education... When will this fad die?" Whether or not iPads in the classroom are a fad or not is really immaterial at this point. Like it or not, many schools are already or will be going one to one with them. So we should probably find the best way to use this technology to support our students.

Last year Dan Spencer put me in contact with Tony DiLaura. Tony is an educator from Zeeland Michigan. He is also excited about the potential impact of teacher created textbooks using iBooks Author. His goal is to bring educators together to collaboratively create resources that can be used to make the creation of these books easier. After some discussion the idea of the iBooks Hackathon was born.

We will officially kickoff the Hackathon at this year's MACUL conference. Then in June we will have two workshops, one on the east side of Michigan and the other on the west side. At these workshops we hope to bring educators together into groups and begin working on cool resources. Throughout the summer these groups will continue to work and in August we will take what has been created to that point and have the official launch of what will hopefully be a large collection of resources for other educators to use.

if you are interested in participating you can check out our Google+ Community as well as our page in the MI-Learning section of MACUL's website.