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Back in November 2016, I attended the @EdTechTeacher21 Innovation Summit, in Boston, #ettsummit. It was a wonderful experience, despite the fact that I missed being in Chicago for games 6 & 7 of the Cubs/Cleveland World Series! Of course, I watched the games nonetheless and was thrilled with the rest of the lifelong Cubs fans when we won, to #FlytheW finally after 104 years of our World Series drought!
Besides the Cubs, one of the many takeaways from this conference included a day on project-based learning that leveraged the Seesaw iPad app as an active-learning journal for adult learners. Our instructor, the talented Beth Hollinsworth, @bethhollinsworth, was a wealth of information and really got us thinking and up and moving on the content. Then she had us creating, processing, synthesizing, and sharing using the Seesaw app. It was a workshop like none other I’ve attended, and I wanted to see if we could incorporate it into our professional development at our school.
We designed a workshop with new teachers first. By incorporating cooperative-learning strategies, leveraging iPad as a creation tool, and community building through the Seesaw app, we learned a lot about what stuck and didn't stick with our new teachers throughout this year’s mentor program. Since the experience went so well, we thought we could design a blended workshop for our final Tech Week, this time with the theme of personalized learning through our Lynda.com subscription and Seesaw.
We met face-to-face for a 43-minute period in our regular "Companions" cross-curricular, learning- community groups, which meet weekly during the school day, to introduce the concept, take a deeper dive into Lynda's vast selection of topics, and for a refresher on Seesaw features. We gave teachers ten days to briefly study a Lynda topic, create an artifact of their choice leveraging iPad and Seesaw to demonstrate their learning, post their artifact and reflection to Seesaw, and reply to another's post. The resulting portfolios were a fun way to share and extend learning, and I’ve posted some examples from our two classes here:
In short, these experiences demonstrated that professional development which incorporates dedicated workday meeting time for cross-discipline groups; learner choice in self-selecting and demonstrating learning; social opportunities for teachers to learn from and with each other; and self-reflection/sharing on the process can go a long way to enriching professional development. This year's goal? How can we expand on this to make it an even stronger experience for teachers and to increase student learning?
