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Moving Beyond PLN & Webinars: How Technology Aids Good Professional Development
posted by: Melissa | June 06, 2014, 08:22 PM   

 

When thinking about technology and professional development, the mind usually jumps directly to PLNs (Professional Learning Networks) or perhaps to webinars.  Yet if we allow our use of technology and our professional learning to stop there, we will be doing ourselves a great disservice.  Technology has the ability to be a much greater force in our professional learning.

 

 

 

The most obvious example of this is the webinar’s older sibling, the MOOC.   MOOCs, or Massive Open Online Courses, are college level courses open to large number of participants.  They use video technology and peer evaluation in order to scale themselves to fit their large audience.  Since they last several weeks, MOOCs tend to go more in-depth than webinars or web chats.  Most importantly, MOOCs are free and offered through a number of different providers, including Coursera and Udacity.

 

Beyond online courses are services like PD 360 and BloomBoard which allow educators to tailor professional learning to their own needs.  They are designed to be used within the confines of a school or district and so it allows teachers and administrators to work together to set learning goals and evaluate the outcomes.  They’re also fairly easy to integrate into a PLC (professional learning community).

 

There are also more innovative uses for combining technology and professional development, like My Teaching Partner which allows for distance coaching.  The coach doesn’t even have to be in the same room, school, or even state as the teacher.  While the coaching happens asynchronously to classroom instruction, it has the benefit of being regular and continuous.  Because the coach doesn’t have to travel, it’s also fairly easy to scale.

 

It’s important to remember that we’re only at the very beginning of exploring the different ways that technology can be used in education.  Be sure to experiment with new platforms and listen to your colleagues for recommendations.

 

 

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