Summer Professional Development
Featured Author:
Kate Olson
Kate Olson is a non-traditional new teacher, coming to the classroom after spending time as an accountant and a stay-at-home mother. She currently teaches Business Education in La Crosse, WI and is an online course developer and facilitator for teacher professional development at Professional Learning Board.
Her current educational passion is integrating new technologies into the classroom and enjoys sharing the exciting new tools she finds with her colleagues at school and in her online personal learning network. When she’s not glued to her laptop doing geeky things like wearing a headset and recording audio for her keyboarding blog, she can be found chasing a baby and toddler around the house, running, scrapbooking, and drinking gallons of coffee.
She blogs about her experiences in teaching and technology at Kate Says and blogs with her students at Keying In and Global Bloggers.
More articles from this author:
Kate Olson | TheApple.com
Andrea Hernandez threw this task at me and even called me out, saying that although I resigned from my teaching position, I still need to keep up on PD – she’s right! My task (read Andrea’s post to read the official meme) is to list 3 things that I plan to do for professional development this summer. Although I’m not returning to a formal classroom in the fall, I’m still an educator and lifelong learner and will pursue professional development opportunities as much as possible.
Here goes:
1) Read more than I write. This may sound simple, but my plan for the summer is to blog a bit less and read a LOT more. I have a stack of books I ordered and haven’t dug into yet and plan to read these over the summer. I also want to spend more time reading online and staying on top of current trends in education, technology, business, and social media. I’ll still be blogging, but I want to focus on the consumption of information rather than the production for a few months.
2) Complete the Intel Teach training that I’ll begin in July with 2 days of face-to-face training then continue with online training. This program will prepare me for training other educators in the Intel Teach program’s method of technology integration. The Intel site says I’ll be learning to teach teachers “how to integrate technology into existing classroom curricula to promote student learning.” I’m really excited about this program and look forward to the training as well as working with teachers next year when I bring the information to them.
3) Learn by doing and teaching. I’m creating and facilitating online courses at Professional Learning Board and in working with educators in these courses I learn SO much. Every teacher I work with brings a different set of skills and different viewpoint that I can learn from. Creating the courses challenges my preparation and technical skills and I’m constantly researching methods for quality online instruction and course creation. I’ll be learning even more about Moodle as I dig into version 1.9 in more detail and teaching others how to use Moodle in my Using Your Moodle course helps me really understand the platform more clearly.
4) An additional thing that I’ll be spending time doing is researching how to maintain my Wisconsin teaching license even though I’m not in the classroom in the fall. Our state has a very rigid system for advancement and I’m currently on a 5-year initial educator license. I need to figure out how that works when I’m not actually in the classroom for 5 consecutive years.
I’m choosing not to tag anyone specifically, but here’s your open tag – if you haven’t been tagged yet, grab onto this and share what you’ll be doing for PD this summer and link back here or comment here so everyone can follow the trail!
