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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

"A few weeks back, I asked the Shake Up Learning Community to share their favorite collaborative tools and this post is a summarization are their top choices. (Click here to join the Shake Up Learning Community.) Collaboration is a critical twenty-first-century skill for our students. Finding ways to facilitate and support collaboration in the classroom is not always easy. Keep in mind that digital tools are not inherently collaborative, it is how you use them to facilitate collaboration in your classroom. All of the tools below have the capability but may support collaboration in different ways."

"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."

ollaboration Tools Collaborative learning is essentially people working together to solve a problem, create a product, or derive meaning from a body of material. A central question or problem serves to organize and drive activities, and encourage application, analysis, and synthesis of course material. While the landscape of technology that can be used to support central activities of collaborative learning is vast and varied, it is often lumped together under a single label: "collaboration tools." Given this vast and distributed landscape of tools, the difficulty of finding one or a set of tools to meet your goals can be time intensive. We are here to help. For faculty who are interested in learning more, want to explore, or try out a tool, contact us to talk with an Eberly colleague in person.

"Available as a web-based tool or an iPad application, Padlet allows teachers and students to create virtual bulletin boards where collaboration, reflection, publishing and sharing of information can occur. As a synchronous learning environment, Padlet supports interaction, sharing, and collaboration in real-time or as an asynchronous learning environment allowing students to learn at their own pace and time. When using Padlet, users can display information in a wide variety of file types, including: links to Google Docs, display images of student work, text, audio reflections, and videos from the camera roll or YouTube. Padlet's formats  allow for a more customized experience for users. A mind-mapping format called Canvas provides the opportunity to move sticky notes to facilitate the creation of mind maps. Users  create visual connections among concepts, facts, and thoughts while providing a way to organize and synthesize information. Recently, I've begun to use Canvas as my "go to" mind-mapping tool. The Canvas format enables teachers and students to work collaboratively across devices and settings while helping learners to see relationships between concepts.  Canvas gives students a way to visually represent their thinking while providing teachers insight into a student's understanding of a specific concept or idea."

Simply set up a private space to drop any files by phone, email, web, widget or fax and then share them with whoever you want via a variety of outputs

Simple private real-time sharing and collaboration. Use drop.io to privately share your files and collaborate in real time by web, email, phone, mobile, and more. Create each drop in two clicks and share what you want, how you want, with whom you want. Check out the 'How To' video. Drop.io is another great site for parents to upload photos quickly for teachers to access. Like Troovi, the teacher would create the drop.io site, set a password, and send the link to parents. Parents simply upload their photos, video, and files to the site and the teacher can download them instantly.

"In my classroom over the last few years I've shown many Youtube videos to inspire resiliency, grit, hope, and discussion prior to guiding them in the creation of their inquiry questions about their passions and wonders during our weekly Genius Hour time.  This post is a follow up post to my post 23 Videos that Sparked Genius Hour Thinking, Collaboration, and Actions.  Many of those videos and the ones I am sharing now were shared with me through the wonderful connections I have made with educators learners on Twitter, Facebook, and at workshops.  I am continually inspired by the educators in my personal learning network.  Thank you to all of you who share your learning and inspirations daily.  You have helped me make sense of the ideas that are floating around in my head.  I am proud to say that students in my classes are constantly inspiring each other and their teacher.  Some of their work is shared on the list below."

What Is Social Bookmarking: Social bookmarking is a form of bookmark sharing that allows you to bookmark websites on the Internet using a service instead of using the browser's bookmarking feature. This service also makes it easy to share bookmarks. The sharing and collaboration feature explains the use of the word "social" in this term. Social bookmarking uses a form of tagging that allows users to tag sites they want to bookmark with a keyword, similar to how Twitter hashtags work.

What Is Social Bookmarking: Social bookmarking is a form of bookmark sharing that allows you to bookmark websites on the Internet using a service instead of using the browser's bookmarking feature. This service also makes it easy to share bookmarks. The sharing and collaboration feature explains the use of the word "social" in this term. Social bookmarking uses a form of tagging that allows users to tag sites they want to bookmark with a keyword, similar to how Twitter hashtags work.

"There are not an abundance of apps for the iPad that really encourage a worthwhile level of collaboration between students or between students and teachers. There are several that would allow students to share an iPad and work on something together on one iPad, but what if you want students to be working on their own iPads at school, at home, or at a time of their choosing? The following 5 apps are designed for just that, and help take advantage of the iPad as a collaborative tool."

"Right now I'm lucky enough to be collaborating with the amazing educators, Michelle Hiebert and Jason Graham. They've invited my class to work on creating a collaborative book. The idea is for one class to write a bit and then pass it on to the next class who in turn adds a bit and then passes it on etc. We've decided to use the Book Creator app on the iPad to create our book. My kinder students have had success in creating books with this simple to use app. We have decided to use DropBox as a way to share the book back and forth with each other. (I recently learned this process from @KLirenman, another awesome educator.) What I thought I'd do is provide a simple how-to on this process. "

"Interactive and collaborative - Whiteboards are a great way for teachers to explain concepts to their students. With the ability of some iPad apps to record, you ensure that students who did not develop understanding of the concept the first time have the opportunity to watch and listen again and again. Working in small groups or brainstorming as a class, collaborative whiteboards are a great way to share ideas. Work in the same room, on the same network or even from different parts of the country. No matter what you are working on these interactive whiteboards are a great way to document or record your thinking process. "

"Drawp for School is an excellent creativity and collaboration tool for teachers and students. It provides students with an intuitive blank canvas and a variety of drawing and painting tools to use for visualizing thoughts and for creating rich mixed media content. Students can collaboratively work on a drawing, add sticky notes, text,  or even record audio clips and share them with teachers who, in their part, can provide feedback in the form of comments."

"After two years of having iPads in our first grade classroom, I've found a few strategies that work to set up a successful and collaborative learning environment. We use our set of iPads to connect, create, share, and much more. However, without a few expectations and procedures our room would be chaos! So here are a few strategies for successful collaboration that can be applied to just about any technology in your classroom."

"With Connected Educator Month now upon us for the third year, I thought it would be fitting for folks to share their experiences in becoming what we call a "connected educator." I was interested in that "Aha!" moment people get when they go from the unconnected side to the more collaborative, sharing world of connected education, a world where educators share globally, collaborating with thought leaders, authors, administrators, teachers, parents, and even students with less regard for titles and higher regard for worthwhile ideas."

"It's a controversial topic: do you introduce social media in the classroom or ignore it? Whether you use traditional social platforms or social-focused tools, many educators find that this technology helps increase engagement and excitement with students, many of who are already very familiar with it. "Students communicate, research, collaborate, create and publish online with or without the help of parents or educators. These same students then hop on social media to promote, discuss and share their thoughts with the world. The digital environment is offering us some of the greatest learning opportunities that young learners have ever had," says Gail Leicht, an 8th grade teacher. Bringing social networking into the classroom gives quiet students a chance to shine; sharing their voice online is often easier than speaking out in class. It also opens the doors for collaboration and communication between peers, both inside and outside of the classroom. Not to mention, it gives teachers another opportunity to connect with students. Despite the benefits, many educators still shy away from using social networking in the classroom because they are unsure about how to integrate it successfully. In fact, fewer than 20 percent of U.S. teachers use social media in the classroom, according to USNews.com. Luckily, the process isn't quite as daunting as it seems. Not to mention, you don't need to use traditional social networks to take advantage of social networking in the classroom. Follow these simple steps and watch as your students start sharing, commenting and publishing while learning important lesson material."

"Diigo is an excellent social bookmarking tool that enable you to save, annotate, and share bookmarks. The power of Diigo lies in the distinctive features that it offers to teachers and educators. There is a special account for K-12 and higher-ed educators that empower registered teachers with a variety of tools and features. One of the best things you can do with the Educator account is creating a Diigo group for your class. You can do this without the need for students emails. You can also set the privacy settings of your group so that only you and your students can access and see what you share there. You can also alternate moderators for class students can take turns in class moderation. Besides using your Diigo class to share with your students websites and content you find on the web, students can also use it for collaboration on research projects, group bookmarks and annotation."

There is a growing momentum in education driven by a desire to share our practice and learn from our colleagues. Increasingly teachers are finding ways to break free of their classrooms and share their ideas. Collaborations in the interests of unlocking the collective potential of the profession are spreading within and importantly between schools. For many these collaborative endeavours and desires are satisfied by online communities but for many the possibility for a face to face conversation is more alluring.

"Bookmarking tools are key to the effective management of digital resources. They allow you to capture  and save important information to read later. Most of these tools provide organizational features enabling users to organize their bookmarked content into boards and collections that can be shared with others. Other tools  even go a step further to provide collaborative features that allow a group of people to collectively bookmark and share online resources. Based on our long experience with reviewing educational web tools, we went ahead and curated for you what we believe are some of the best bookmarking tools for teachers. These are tools you can use to bookmark, annotate and share resources you come across online. We invite you to check out our updated below and share with us your feedback in our Facebook page. Links are provided under the visual."