Re-visiting the PD 2009 Meme

Early in the summer I was tagged for the Professional Development Meme 2009. This meme was started by Clif Mims. Normally I'm not crazy about memes--they remind me too much of chain letters--but I felt that this one was worth my time :-) For the meme I wrote a post about three goals I would like to accomplish over the summer. Below I'll list the goals and how I did.

• Read 'Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns'. Not only did I read the book, I blogged my reflections on it here.


• Learn more about teaching using Moodle. I chose this as a goal because my district was moving over to using Moodle as our learning management system (LMS). Prior to that we offered on-line courses through Open School BC and their WebCT system. Regrettably, I did not spend much time on this particular goal. I was very familiar with Moodle from the perspective of a student and as a facilitator (thank you KnowSchools!) and I had taken an introductory course on Moodle in June. I guess I'm just saying that it's not like I was totally unprepared for the change over to Moodle. I hope to write more on the change over to Moodle in a little while.


• Prepare for the two professional development sessions I will be facilitating at the end of the summer. I spent A LOT of time on this one. In fact I probably spent too much time on it. I'm guessing I put at least 10 hours of preparation for each session; the sessions were around 3.5 hours each. In the end I enjoyed doing the sessions, but found that it is really difficult to design a session for all levels of technical ability. I plan on writing more about these sessions, but at this point I'll just leave you with the link to the website I created to support the course. My goal was to provide participants with the information so that they could progress through the different topics at their own pace.

So, I feel good about how I did on two of the three goals and overall I'm pretty pleased with the PD part of my summer. Now excuse me while I go and spend a bit more time learning to Moodle...

A Technology Plan For My School

Lately I've been doing a lot of thinking about how to improve student learning at the Distributed Learning (DL) school where I teach. Jeff Utecht's series of posts on developing a tech plan have really clarified my thinking on this. This is my current 'wish list' for my school:

• provide all 8 - 10 students with lap tops (currently we provide computers for most 8 - 10s, but laptops only to those students who will be traveling.)
• offer more 'mini courses' to 8 - 10s on specific web 2.0 topics--eg a mini-course on blogging where the students come to our school with their laptops to learn with each other how to set up and effectively use a blog.
  
• Improve our school website so that it becomes the effective portal that Jeff Utech discusses in his tech plan series.
• Move to a single Learning Management System (LMS)--currently we use Moodle, Web CT and we have paper based courses. I would like to see us move to something like Moodle (though I need to learn much more about it to fully understand all that it can offer). I'm leaning toward Moodle because it is free open source software and from what I've seen so far it does a pretty good job.
• Educate our students' parents about the web 2.0 tools that we are using with their kids so that have less fear about their kids being on-line. Perhaps a series of workshops, or invitations to parents to attend and participate in the 'mini courses' that I mentioned earlier.
• Student Information System? Is ours working? Can it work better (I think so)?

I'm sure I'll add more to my list in the coming weeks, but this is a start at least.