Mr Bass Online

This is an email that I sent out to my teachers for a PD opportunity I’m offering in my district.  Last year I offered something similar and it went well.  Not great participation, but great discussion.  If you’re interested, we’ll be posting our responses/own presentations at Notk12onlineconference.org

Starting next week I will be offering a salary credit class (1 full credit will be earned through this class) based on the K12 Online Conference, a virtual conference with presenters from across the world.  The class will meet 3 times from 4-6.  The other sessions will be on your own with participation in a Moodle discussion forum.  Finally, participants will create their own virtual “presentation” in response to or inspired by one of the sessions that they watched.  These presentations will then be posted to NotK12OnlineConference.org to be viewed by others.  I will be available to help with the technical side of the presentations as well as working on generating ideas for them.  The idea behind the class is to engage in the greater conversation about education and look outside Parkway for teaching strategies and instructional practices.  Many of the sessions will focus on using technology in the classroom but they are not limited to that

Each participant will write reflection and keep a log of the sessions attended. The final face-to-face session will be a facilitated discussion about what was learned, the benefits of the conference, and the next steps for those involved in terms of taking their learning back into their classrooms. Additionally, participants will create their own digital presentation in response to or sparked from one they saw on the K12 Online Conference. These presentations will be submitted to the NotK12OnlineConference (http://notk12onlineconference.org) for use by others.

I’m looking forward to the conversations around this.  I’ll keep you posted.

Today was a good day for me.  Students in my district were not in school and the entire day was committed to professional development.  While this is not a new thing in the world of education, one thing I liked about the structure of today was that this afternoon, all Communication Arts teachers came together in one of our buildings for a mini-conference of sorts.  There were two one-hour sessions, each with about 6 different choices for teachers to attend.  I led one of the sessions and focused my hour on the idea of student feedback and peer-review.  English teachers often find themselves with a mountain of papers in which they need to wade through.  We know that timely feedback is important, but when you’re staring at a pile of papers, it’s sometimes hard to imagine that you will actually be able to make meaningful comments on each and that students will take these comments to heart and that the feedback will ultimately improve writing over time.

In this post, I don’t want to write about the presentation itself, I really want to share a direction that I’m trying to take in all the classes I lead with teachers.  So many times in technology, I think we tell people what to click on and tell them how to use a specific tool.  This is sometimes appropriate, but I also think that we are missing an opportunity to show how these tools can be used for instructional purposes.  Today I wanted to show them Google Sites and Docs, however, I didn’t want this to be the focus of my presentation. Rather, I wanted them to see how these tools could be used for instructional purposes while at the same time keeping my focus on feedback.  By using the tools and telling them why I chose that tool as I was focusing on the content, I was able to capture and hold participants attention at 2:30 on a Friday afternoon.  They were exposed to the tools and shown where to find them and my focus stayed on the content I wanted to cover.

Not that this is a groundbreaking strategy, but it’s something that I’m working on so I can better help the teachers I work with. I know there are times that I will need to show what to click on, but in situations like today, my goal is to focus on the content and use the tools to help me.