geek.teacher

This week I ran my first Professional Development sessions with content completely designed by myself. In previous years, I’ve either worked together with somebody to train teachers in a topic, or have basically delivered content that was deemed essential by my administration. This time I have to sink or swim all on my own.

I talked with my principal a few months back about offering training sessions to show people how to communicate with other teachers online. I then promptly spent several months pondering what I wanted to do, and outlining the basics. After Christmas Break, I committed myself and sent out an e-mail to everybody in my school offering to teach them about “Using the Internet to Communicate and Collaborate.” I gave them a Google form to fill out to gauge interest, and got enough that I planned to do each session on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. I then had to take a bit of a sidetrack as I jumped through bureaucratic hoops to ensure that the teachers who come can get their Act 48 (Continuing Education) Credits.

I have two missions for the four sessions I’m planning on running:

1. Primary mission: help teachers to learn about the tools they can use to build their own Personal Learning Network.
2. Treat them like adults. I’m not going to just read to them.

The first part I spent months planning out. The second part continues now as I truck along. I decided to, whenever possible, use my own photos or screenshots to demonstrate ideas and concepts.  Almost all my slides will be heavy on images and light on words. Words will be in a large font. If I use somebody else’s work, it has to be Freeware or Creative Commons. I did rapid prototyping of my slides in Docs, then I made the refined versions in Keynote. I imported back into Docs for easy sharing and adding links as needed.

Here’s my first slideshow, showing what building a PLN has done for me. This was the most me-talky phase of the whole thing, but I wanted to get it right out there why PLN has been so great to me, getting them to understand why it could also be great for them. Fortunately, it was short.

I’m really glad that I started this the week after EduCon, since I’m still on a bit of an education high from it all. It’s no coincidence that the first session I went to was “Subversive PD.” It helped focus me on the need to make sure that I engage the people I’m working with in conversation as much as possible. When talking about my nerves the morning of my first presentation, Bill Ferriter reminded me of that in response:

So I tried. I didn’t always succeed, but I did my best to bring people into the conversation. There were plenty of good questions as some of the people there really wrestled with the idea of uses for Google Docs both in our teaching community and in their classrooms. Whenever possible, I did my best to point them int he direction of ideas I know others have tried, and I frankly admitted when I didn’t know how to do something. For me, the not knowing was a strength in many ways, because as I pointed out, I may not have done a certain activity, but if I wanted to, someone in my network would probably be able to point me in the right direction.

Here’s the Google slides. Structure: Show them a tool, we talk about the uses in school. Next slide, another tool, more discussion. Finally, get them to sign up for Google accounts and start collaborating on a Doc sharing their contact info to start.

So how do I know that I didn’t suck? Both days we went a half hour over the allotted time and nobody seemed to be restless or needed to rush out right at the official stop time. They stuck around, we got everybody signed up and they all edited the document.

Today I e-mailed them all and gave them homework to add everybody to their contacts list. I’m feeling upbeat, so I added this:

Extra credit: create a document saying something nice to somebody in our network, then share the file with them. Smile.

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