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Pointless or purposeful???

"As the end of the school year draws to a close, administrators start pulling together their PD plans for the summer in preparation for the next year. Meanwhile, teachers sit anxiously by with the dread that can only come with the anticipation of the dreaded PD days that their contract says they must attend. It's not that teachers don't want to grow and improve their craft. They do, and they find it refreshingly professionalizing when they get to. It's just that this ain't their first rodeo. They've been made to sit through pointless professional development in the past and they lament that they're thinking "how long will this last and what will I have to turn in…and when is lunch?" as they trudge toward the library down the hallway that so obviously lacks the normal student energy they've used as fuel for the past 9 months. But it doesn't have to be like that. In fact, if we do things well, teachers are likely to come away from their professional development energized and excited."

""Why does this matter?" Teachers are often called upon to answer this question about an academic subject, and computer science instructors may face this demand more frequently than most. Learning to write lines of code can seem, to many students, like a pointless exercise in tedium. But a few professors of computer science have a compelling reply at the ready. They are participants in the Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software project, known as HFOSS-or, more grandly, Software for Humanity. Why does this matter? these professors might respond. Because it's helping to feed needy people in Haiti, or to deliver supplies to earthquake survivors in China, or to manage the medical care of malaria victims in Rwanda."

Writing policy documents may seem like a boring or even pointless job, but an up-to-date and meaningful Acceptable Use Policy is crucial to, and underpins, everything we do in terms of educational technology.

"Let's say you have a big paper coming up, a presentation that involves some in-depth online research, or perhaps something completely pointless to look up on Google. Whatever your reason for diving into the bottomless pit that is online searching, it's important to know about the resources and guides that are out there. Lucky for you, the people basically running online searches (Google) have you hooked up. If you're a student of any age, then listen up. Check out the guides and free Google tools available at 'Search Education,' a free site filled with anything you could ever dream of … if you dream of helpful guides to Google searching."