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"Please, No More Professional Development! By Peter DeWitt on April 17, 2015 8:10 AM Today's guest blog is written by Kristine Fox (Ed.D), Senior Field Specialist/Research Associate at Quaglia Institute for Student Aspirations (QISA). She is a former teacher and administrator who has passion for teacher learning and student voice. Kris works directly with teachers and leaders across the country to help all learners reach their fullest potential. Peter DeWitt recently outlined why "faculty meetings are a waste of time." Furthering on his idea, most professional development opportunities don't offer optimal learning experiences and the rare teacher is sitting in her classroom thinking "I can't wait until my district's next PD day." When I inform a fellow educator that I am a PD provider, I can read her thoughts - boring, painful, waste of time, useless, irrelevant - one would think my job is equal to going to the dentist (sorry to my dentist friends). According to the Quaglia Institute and Teacher Voice and Aspirations International Center's National Teacher Voice Report only 54% percent of teachers agree "Meaningful staff development exists in my school." I can't imagine any other profession being satisfied with that number when it comes to employee learning and growth. What sense does it make for the science teacher to spend a day learning about upcoming English assessments? Or, for the veteran teacher to learn for the hundredth time how to use conceptual conflict as a hook. Why does education insist everyone attend the same type of training regardless of specialization, experience, or need? As a nod to the upcoming political campaigns and the inevitable introduction of plans with lots of points, here is my 5 Point Plan for revamping professional development. 5 Point Plan Point I - Change the Term: Semantics Matter We cannot reclaim the term Professional Development for teachers. It has a long, baggage-laden history of conformity that does not

"After writing about the 14 techy concepts every teacher should know about, Educational Technology and Mobile Learning is providing you with a list of learning methods together with their definitions. Knowing about these methods and employing them in your classroom will definitely make a difference in your teaching practics. Check them out below and share with us what you think of them. Enjoy"

"According to a study conducted in the chemistry department of the Catholic University done by Diane M. Bunce, Elizabeth A. Flens, and Kelly Y. Neiles in Washington D.C., it was found that while the original belief of the 10-15 minute attention span may be true, it was not the whole truth. Here is the rest of the story. It is true that the first lapse of attention (or first break in attention) occurred at approximately the 10-18 minute mark, but after this initial break, the later attention lapses occurred more and more frequently. By the end of class, attention breaks were cycling every 3-4 minutes. In other words, in the last parts of class, students are only paying attention for 3-4 minutes at a time! So what does this mean for you? This means that introducing different elements into the routine may benefit both you and your students by helping them pay more attention so that you can be a more effective teacher. This is where the pomodoro method comes in."

"PBL or Project Based Learning is a method of teaching that has been around for a long time that is getting more and more attention due to all the tools technology leads itself to. Basically, PBL allows for teachers to "ask" a question that allows students to solve in a variety of a ways using many different analytical methods. Since, Project Based Learning incorporates a lot of different techniques and tools to use I've decided to create a list of resources rather then just one of sites or apps."

"Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology unveiled a new 3D printing method on Friday that employs transparent glass as precursor instead of plastic. The method, called 3DGP, works basically the same way that conventional 3D printing does though the team found that they could modulate the light transmission, reflection and refraction qualities by precisely varying the thickness of the print."

"Importantly, our early indications suggest that the least effective method of reading may be the one society has been clinging to for centuries: reading on paper."

"There are two main methods for capturing text while using your iPad.  One way is by using Siri to carry out an ever growing variety of commands and tasks.  The other method is through dictation accessed via your iPad keyboard.  While Siri is a perfectly capable tool to use for dictation, and might be your preferred way to capture text, we have found that our favorite digital assistant especially shines when asked to answer questions and perform tasks.  Thomas recently wrote about some of his favorite uses for Siri on his iPad.  Dictation, however, is more of a quick and dirty way to collect your thoughts and have them transposed right onto your iPad screen whenever you typically would need to enter text in an app.  Think of it as an alternative to typing.  While a very helpful tool, there are some initial challenges to dictating effectively on your iPad or other iOS device.  The manner in which we speak doesn't always translate exactly to how we write-or even how we collect our thoughts.  As a result we've collected some tips to help you be the most efficient at using dictation."

"Having a digital classroom means a few different things: 1. You have less stacks of paper 2. It is (generally) easier to keep track of student work 3. "The dog ate my homework" isn't a viable excuse anymore 4. Note taking needs to take a new form 5. You need another method of sharing work that doesn't involve handing papers from one person to another Clearly, number 5 on this list is the one that will cause you the most thought these days, unless your dog is into eating computers - and then you have a bigger problem on your hands. Lots of things need to be shared. Students need to hand in their work, teachers need to offer feedback on said work, students need to share their collaborative work, and teachers need to share classroom information and tools of all variety. Luckily, there are tons of different tools out there that can enable you to share nearly any type of file (from .doc/.docx and .ppt to .mov, .mp3/4 , .zip and more!). There's a lot of info out there on different cloud storage services - which are a great way to share files - but many of these are business focused and not as classroom friendly. We've put together a short list of some of our favorite methods of file sharing so that you, your colleagues, and your students can spend more time on the good stuff and less time trying to figure out how to get the information to one another."

"For the past few years, Edudemic has covered the rise of the flipped classroom and its subsequent evolution. Each year, we find that more teachers are testing this new learning strategy and creating new ways to improve current methods. While some teachers are trying it out for the first time this fall, others who used the flipped classroom method in 2013 are making changes to build on their lesson plans for the 2014-15 school year. Read this brief guide to learn why flipped learning is an increasingly popular choice, and review a few steps for teachers wanting to try it ou"

"According to an article on Time.com about the best and worst learning techniques, active learning methods (e.g. writing) are far more useful for long-term retention than passive learning methods (e.g. highlighting or underline words). One of the best ways? Surprisingly enough: flashcards, according to research from the Association of Psychological Science."

Might help create a blended classroom, even when you have to share the blender.  Common sense advise for the real world of underequipped classrooms and stretched thin teachers.

"About two decades ago The MIT Media lab introduced the concept of block-based programming. The idea was to develop an interface that allowed computer programs to be built by simply dragging and dropping puzzle blocks to represent complex programming constructs and commands. With this new method for teaching and learning computer science, the hugely popular Scratch platform was born. This approach lowered the bar for experimenting with programmatic thinking, making it possible for students to create interactive animations and small games without writing a single line of code. This simple concept removed the need to learn the syntax of a formal programming language, and made teaching and learning the basics of computer science accessible to younger learners and to teachers with no formal coding background. Outside of the classroom though, coding has always been, and still remains, a process of typing letters, numbers and symbols. This text-based programming, used in programming language such as C, Javascript and Python, requires coders to obey and conform to formal syntax. Despite the pain of dealing with typos in names of variables and inevitable syntax errors, no other coding method designed to be more "user friendly" has really caught on. Tools have been offered for managers to define business logic through a graphical user interface without writing lines of codes. Or for web developers to add interactive behaviors to their websites without learning Javascript. But in reality, neither of those substitute the power and flexibility of text-based programming. And with neither winning significant adoption, the demand for the classic skill of text-based coding continues to grow and grow."

"At a recent talk for special education teachers at the Los Angeles Unified School District, child development professor Maryanne Wolf urged educators to say the word dyslexia out loud. "Don't ever succumb to the idea that it's going to develop out of something, or that it's a disease," she recalled telling teachers. "Dyslexia is a different brain organization that needs different teaching methods. It is never the fault of the child, but rather the responsibility of us who teach to find methods that work for that child." Wolf, who has a dyslexic son, is on a mission to spread the idea of "cerebrodiversity," the idea that our brains are not uniform and we each learn differently. Yet when it comes to school, students with different brains can often have lives filled with frustration and anguish as they, and everyone around them, struggle to figure out what is wrong with them."

ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning. ERP is the root of productivity for any institution. It not only saves time but also makes sure to make use of the resources effectively. A lot of institutions have switched to online ERP from an offline system. Online systems, especially school management dashboard system have picked up pace since the world has become aware of the advantages of online system over offline methods, few of them being sustainable methods that help in saving the environment.

"There is an awful lot of hot air blown about accessing student work from "class sets" of iPads, via email, WebDAV, Dropbox etc etc. A little known and cool method is this… We all know that we can share via iTunes over USB to any Mac/PC with a recent version of iTunes. Well would you believe the same thing works without a cable and it doesn't have to be the Mac/PC that manages the devices. It means that any teacher can access all the students files on a device that has been "Saved to iTunes". You can even pick up the work, mark it and hand it back to the iPad whilst the iPad is still being used by the kids (unbeknown to the user!)."

"So many of us teach the way we were taught. We may not even realize we're doing it. And that means certain practices get passed down year after year without question, methods that are such a normal part of the way we do school, we perpetuate them without realizing there are better alternatives. Today I'm going to roll out five of these for your consideration: five teaching practices used every day that are not backed by research. In many cases, these practices are not only ineffective, they can be downright harmful."

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