MOOCs from Great Universities (Many With Certificates) 5 fresh ways to keep professional development engaging. By Joe Dixon Read more by Contributor January 14th, 2014 4: Build a culture of risk-taking: Once educators are connected and practicing their craft they will be much more likely to take chances; however, this takes time and confidence.
Remember, meaningful PD must be continuous, on-demand and social. Imagine being able to invite a trusted colleague into your classroom to watch your instruction, or better yet, to watch them teach to your students. Well, that is the idea behind embedded professional development and it helps to accelerate this process. Teachers, and all people for that matter, are more likely to experiment when they are supported and receive immediate feedback from people they trust. Create Your Own Roundtable. Teacher Agency: Educators Moving from a Fixed to a Growth Mindset. It is a myth that we operate under a set of oppressive bureaucratic constraints.
In reality, teachers have a great deal of autonomy in the work they chose to do in their classrooms. In most cases it is our culture that provides the constraints. For individual teachers, trying out new practices and pedagogy is risky business and both our culture, and our reliance on hierarchy, provide the ideal barriers for change not to occur. As Pogo pointed out long ago, “we have met the enemy and it is us.” Educational psychology has focused on the concepts of learned helplessness and more currently growth-fixed mindsets as a way to explain how and why students give up in the classroom setting. Many educators feel forced into a paradigm of teaching where they feel subjected to teaching practices outside of their control. But these are external obstacles whereby the educator places blame for resisting change or engaging in a growth mindset outside of one’s own responsibility. Teacher Agency Like this: Seven simple tricks to impressively speed up slow iPads.
Remember the day when you took your iPad out of its box for the first time?
How fast it ran? How snappy it was? Yeah, those were the days. For me, these days are long over; I am still rocking a first gen iPad that is getting a little old after more than three years of great use. But why upgrade when it still works? 5 Tips for Integrating Social Media Into Your Next Business Event. I remember my first exposure to the world of event marketing.
I was interning at a record label in New York in 2001 and I was tasked to comb the Harlem neighborhood surrounding the then-hot restaurant/lounge Jimmy’s Uptown with promotional flyers. There was a young R&B singer by the name of John Stephens (better known as John Legend) set to perform that night, and label management wanted to make sure everyone coming to the show knew about a new priority album that was set to drop the following week. Little did I know, but I was doing guerilla marketing in its purest form. This experience helped shape and dictate my career path over the next decade, with guerilla marketing giving way to radio promotions, sampling programs, experiential activations, popup stores, concert productions and everything in between.
Of course, in the “good old days” of event marketing, the objective was simpler — engage consumers and invite them to participate on-site with the participating brand. 1. 2. 3. 4. ABC: 10 reasons NOT to create a course and 10 other options. My colleague, Clark Quinn, recently wrote a blog post, Yes, you do have to change, in which he explained how he felt that “the elearning industry, and the broader learning industry, is severely underperforming the potential”.
He also went on to say: “While the industry congratulates itself on how they make use of the latest technology, the lack of impact is leading a drive to irrelevancy. Learners tolerate the courses, at best. Operations groups and others are beginning to focus on the performance solutions available. Executives are beginning to hear a message that the old approach is a waste of resources.”
Show and Tell PD: Building Our Passion for Independent Learning. With the rise of MOOCs, Edupunks, and other radically transformative notations of school, I hear a lot of talk about building capacities for independent learning in our students.
Where will this come from, I ask, if we do not re-awaken the desire and capacity for learning on our own within all of our teachers? This may not be as difficult as it sounds, if we revive a much beloved learning tool from childhood: Show and Tell. The Importance of Passionate Play I don’t know about you, but I loved Show and Tell. I couldn’t wait to bring my favorite doll (a Maori child in custom garb my father had brought back from New Zealand) or book or seashell to class. I also loved Show and Tell because it presented learning as play rather than chalkboard or workbook instruction, and because we sat in a circle rather than in long lines facing the front of the class. Play, if you think about it, is fundamentally self-directed. The Importance of Sharing Teaching is a closed-door profession.