The Savvy Technologist » Professional Development

Learning on a stick Minnesota style

Tim Wilson — Mon, 12 May 2008 23:41:24 +0000

At the most recent meeting of the Minnesota Education Media Organization Technology Special Interest Division (I couldn’t resist writing that out) I learned about a cool professional development opportunity called 23 Things On a Stick. Curious about the name? If you’ve visited the Minnesota State Fair you’d know how we in Minnesota love things on a stick.

The 23 Things… program is a largely self-paced set of tutorials intended for teachers and library folks in Minnesota who want to learn more about Web 2.0 tools. The “Things” include RSS, photosharing, collaboration, social media, online productivity, online gaming, podcasts, video, and social networking. Each participant is required to maintain a blog for the duration of the project to foster reflection and interaction with other participants.

I’d like to see someone turn the 23 Things program into a Moodle course that can be distributed to any school that is using Moodle for professional development. (“23 Things On a Stick” is made available under an Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike Creative Commons license.) Any takers?

Training “just in time”

Tim Wilson — Mon, 11 Jul 2005 20:52:07 +0000

I’ve consistently said since I started my current job nearly two years ago that the era of one-size-fits-all professional development needs to end. It may have been appropriate to put 25 teachers in a computer lab for a training program in the early days when none of them had much educational technology experience, but that certainly isn’t the case anymore. Let’s take a theoretical example of a training session with those 25 teachers with the goal to teach them how to manage digital pictures with iPhoto. Of those 25, one-third will never has used iPhoto or a maybe even a digital camera, one-third will have enough experience with the tools to recognize that they would like to learn more, and one-third will be experience digital photographers who have 2,000 photos in their iPhoto library and could probably teach the class. No matter what group you target in the training, two-thirds of the group will go home frustrated because it went over their heads or bored because it was too basic.

This principle was reinforced to me throughout the professional development program for our one-to-one computing project. We did some training early on and it was obvious that the sessions were operating at too high a level for a substantial number of the teachers in the group. (Yes, we had actual tears from at least two participants.) Nothing like making a teacher cry to bring home the importance of this issue. We improved our training program substantially and by the end of the year we were offering much smaller training “electives” that teachers could choose from to help ensure that they were getting the material at an appropriate level. A mentoring model is an obvious next step, and I plan to work on that this year.

The final principle that I discovered was that teachers (and everyone else by extension) can only learn when they’re ready to hear what is being taught. It’s of little use to teach iPhoto to someone who’s never taken a digital picture. Ever tried teaching people about blogs who aren’t regular blog readers? They may enjoy the training, but the chance that they will begin blogging seriously themselves is practically zero. When I get questions from teachers about some bit of technology that they were trained on a few weeks or months earlier, it’s obvious that they didn’t learn it the first time because they weren’t ready to hear it.

This “just in time” element is evident in my thinking about our curriculum sharing tool. I’m convinced that the system won’t be used to its utmost unless the district’s teachers get timely suggestions of resources that they can use right away. Talking to someone about a technology tool that they might use in a few months isn’t effective. You need to get the information to them when the curriculum is already on their minds.

IT Conversations is a must hear

Tim Wilson — Thu, 11 Nov 2004 04:16:11 +0000

My commute isn’t awful, but 30 miles and roughly 45 minutes each way is probably a little longer than average for the Twin Cities. At least we have outstanding public radio here. In the weeks since I discovered podcasting I’ve been mixing the MPR listening with various podcasts and have come to appreciate the IT Conversations podcasts most of all. A short list of some of my favorite IT Conversations sessions includes presentations by Steve Wozniak, Wil Wheaton, Malcolm Gladwell, and Janine Benyus; interviews with Bruce Schneier and Phil Zimmermann; and fantastic panel discussions from Gnomedex 4.0, PopTech!2004, and Bloggercon III. The content on IT Conversations alone justifies the price of my iPod.

So how about the educational conferences? I’m presenting a workshop and a couple sessions at the TIES 2004 Education Technology Conference in December. I think I’ll record my presentations and podcast them. Wouldn’t it be great if educational conferences started embracing this? How could this technology be used for professional development in a school district? What if someone recorded short interviews with master teachers and made them available as podcasts? What a great way to share knowledge among teachers.