EDTC 6037 - Team Blog

Professional Development I originally had planned to create a flipped classroom PD in a hybrid style, with parts of the PD being online/asynchronous & parts of the PD being in-person discussions/workshops. However, with the pandemic & the sudden change to focusing on remote learning, there was no way that teachers or the administration would be willing for me to do such a PD. Most of the teachers were focused on getting stuff to their students/adjusting to the new paradigm of working from home, and I was swamped as a tech facilitator with making sure that students had devices and internet connections in order to do work. Instead of doing a PD on a flipped classroom, I instead moved my PD to a more generalized plan of supporting teachers based on their individual classroom needs and activities. For example, I assisted the atheletic trainers with the basics of Canvas & helped them with transitioning what would be activities directly observed by the coaches to activities tha...

Hyperdocs was the professional development that I had planned for my PD implementation.  My goal was to present this PD during the teachers' already scheduled PLC time.  I usually offer professional development to them once a month.  We were going to increase those times to bi-monthly for this PD. I wanted to do it during PLC times rather than after school based on my reading from the text of Hew and Brush that stated that a lack of time was one of the most significant factors that teachers face.  By having them to complete this during that time, I was able to preserve their after school time, and I had hoped that teachers would be more willing to learn and excited.  I was only going to provide the PD to the second-grade teachers.  I had picked them because our K-2 school will be transitioning to Chromebooks, and I wanted to use them as the digital leaders in the school the following year. When COVID19 closed, our schools and teachers were scrambling to c...

What did you do and learn from your PD activities? How did you utilize the learning materials from this course to support your PD development and delivery? I originally planned on doing a five week course where each week we would learn about a new website or tool that we could then use in our classrooms right away. I had talked to some of the teachers in my school and asked them what they wanted to learn in terms of technology integration and they all said new tools. I had set up our professional development as a course in Canvas which is the platform we use with our kids. A few teachers wanted to see and use it as a student. I spoke with my instructional coach and she was able to help me work it out so everyone who participated could one 1 Digital CEU! The plan was to meet every Thursday from 8-9 where I would introduce the tool and we would work through some activities together. Then the teachers would have various assignments to complete that week and use the tool in their classr...

I wasn't able to complete my PD plan due to unexpected circumstances in the world around us. I felt no one expected for something like this to take place in the world that would put a big impact on our lives. I had planned on delivering the PD the week after the shutdown. Since I wasn't able to deliver the PD in person I consulted with a team of educators about the possibility of doing an online webinar PD. The pandemic really proved how much we as educators knew about remote learning and how often it was used inside the classroom to transition to a remote setting. In the first couple of weeks, my district offered online training as refresher courses to assist teachers on how to deliver instructions online. Since we just found out that school is out until the end of the year another training has been scheduled.  All the student teachers and internship had to stop indefinite! There was no way that I could have presented the PD through a webinar due to all the teachers I con...