Part of my role as an educator is to also be a learner. One way that I do this is make sure that I keep reading texts, articles, blog posts and tweets about education. This helps me to consider how I teach, the effectiveness of my teaching and to find other ways to approach the teaching tasks I have. Over the school holidays I have touched base with my favourite blogs through my RSS reader – Google Reader – and I have dipped into a few books now and then. Today I came across this little gem and found a few things to inspire me. That included this piece of advice about rules:
Never have more than three rules for your media
center.These are mine:
Be doing something productive
Be doing it in a way that allows others to be productive
Be respectful of other people and their property.
Great little reminder to keep things simple.
School is nearly back for me and I have enjoyed creating my on PD throughout the holidays. I will need to keep creating my own PD opportunities as I move through another teaching year. My first new step was to accept the opportunity to run a PD session for some senior secondary teachers. Not something that I would have considered without being approached. We had a fairly relaxed session exploring the Promethean software that goes with the Promethean Activboards. What did I gain from this?
- An insight into how hard it can be to learn new software.
- Confirmation of the range of approaches to technology use by teachers.
- How PD does need to be very personalized for teachers to gain the most benefit.
- To slow down with my explanations!
- That technology hiccups are always there and that finding the solution is easy afterwards but then it is too late.
- I like talking about and sharing technology ideas with others.
How do you organize your personal PD?