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This excerpt from an interview with Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, PLP founder, captures critical points for PD online. "Will and I agreed that we would only work with teams of school-based educators because the research made it clear that it was collaborative teams within in a school, working together, that really brought about sustainable improvement. That would give us what we needed to anchor the virtual experience in a local context. We also wanted participants to experience a global community of practice-to be able to have conversations with people very different than themselves, with fresh perspectives. Our thinking was that if we put teams of educators who had different ideologies, different geography, different purposes and challenges, all together in the same space, then they could each bring what they did well to the table and people could learn from that. Ultimately that would mean public, private, Catholic, and other kinds of schools; educators teaching well-to-do, middle-class, and poor kids; educators in different states and nations, at different grade levels, and in different content areas and roles. What ultimately grew out of our brainstorming was a three-pronged model of professional development that emphasizes (1) local learning communities at the school/district level; (2) an online community of practice that's both global and deep; and (3) a third prong that is more personal-the idea of a personal learning network that each educator develops as a mega-resource for ideas and information about their particular interests and areas of practice. (These three prongs are described in depth in a new book, The Connected Educator, where PLP community leader Lani Ritter Hall and I tell the story of the evolution of our model and the very solid research base behind it.)

Action Research tips for college bound teens to work together on a project, specifically that challenging phase when team members don't yet know what they want to work on.

by Ron Tanner, November 6, 2011 This article echoes some of what Geoff ? said several years ago. When I began teaching a course called "Writing for the Web," three years ago, I pictured myself scrambling to keep up with my plugged-in, tech-savvy students. I was sure I was in over my head. So I was stunned to discover that most of the 20-year-olds I meet know very little about the Internet, and even less about how to communicate effectively online. The media present young people as the audacious pilots of a technological juggernaut. Think Napster, Twitter, Facebook. Given that the average 18-year-old spends hours each day immersed in electronic media, we oldsters tend to assume that every other teenager is the next Mark Zuckerberg. Aren't kids crazy about downloading music, swapping files, sharing links, texting, and playing video games? But video games do not create savvy users of the Internet. Video games predate the Internet and have little to do with online culture. When games are played online, the computer is no longer an open portal to the world. It is an insular system, related only to other gaming machines, like Nintendo and Xbox. The only communication that games afford is within the closed world of the game itself-who is on my team? At their worst, games divert children from other, more enriching experiences. The Internet's chief similarity to video games is that both siphon off audiences from television, which will soon reside exclusively on the Internet. As a delivery system for television, film, and games, the Internet has proved itself a premier source of entertainment. And that's all that most young people know about it. Why wouldn't we educate students in sophisticated uses of the Internet, which is commanding an increasing amount of the world's time and attention? I'm not talking about a course on "How to Understand the Internet" or an introduction to searching for legitimate research-paper sources online (although that is useful, obviously

Exercises for helping a group use past experience to identify how they can and should work together by Sara Carney

PechaKucha is a presentation format: 20 slides x 20 seconds.

SIL Team, Doris told me about this and Eric Markinson sent it to me. It's an awesome idea to share with your students as they go out to present, but it's also something you could organize in your School, Local Community, etc. Terry