Today we had something that unfortunately is becoming increasingly rare – an in-school PD Day where we were able to control the agenda. First, I have to thank our board for allowing us to plan our own day. This makes such a wonderful difference! Within the parameters of our school improvement plan, teachers chose to focus on one of the ‘critical actions’ outlined in the plan.
This is how the day looked:
PD Plan for Friday
I. Seesaw – presentation on the Seesaw tool for student engagement
II. Innovative Learning Stance: What am I doing differently this year to help achieve the school priorities? What are my critical actions and what do I expect to see as a result of these actions?
responses from teachers
III. Leveraging Digital – choose one digital tool to work on – it can be seesaw, Edublogs (see below) or some aspect of Discovery PD section here or another tutorial from Atomic Learning. Please add your choice to the survey (you are able to go in and edit your answers – you will need to do this by the end of the day) What learning can you record (based on your work today)here that we can add to our SIPSaw?
Ten Easy Ways to Integrate Technology in the Classroom Training
I asked them to record their learning , I can add this to our school improvement plan. This is some of what they came up with. Pretty amazing.
People came up at the end of the day and talked about how much they enjoyed the experience. All the learning was authentic and valuable because the teachers were in control.
What I would wish for are more days like this. In other countries, the number of PD days allocated to teachers is much higher. (How High-Achieving Countries Develop Great Teachers)
Let us hope that in the future, teachers will have more great learning opportunities like today.
Whole-Hearted 