Wednesday, November 11, 2015

Online Professional Development: will it work for your district?

Last summer I created two online professional development courses for our district.  The two offerings were Google Basic and Google Advanced.  The content for these classes were determined by our district goals to assist staff members to become more proficient Google users.

I used Google Classroom as a platform for the classes.  Each "student" was send a code to join the class on June 1st and all work had to be completed by August 1st.  I used the same material from my face-to-face class, so in theory, the online user could complete the course in six hours, the same amount of time as the face-to-face participant.  In the basic class, assignments were based on the rudiments of Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides.  As we advanced to the next class, we worked on a Google Site and incorporated documents and calendars previously created.

Teachers signed in via a Google Form, and I used the Sheet generated by the form to record each assignment that was completed.  At the end of the summer, I shared that documents with the director of professional development to record participant's hours.

Each assignments was accompanied by a Google Doc explaining the assignment and a screen recording demonstrating how to accomplish the task.  I made all of the screen recordings on my Mac using Quick Time.  There were a few pre-made videos pulled from YouTube, but for the most part, all videos were my creation, because I has specific tasks I wanted accomplished.

There were over 50 participants that successfully completed one or both courses, with only one person who began in earnest and did not finish.  I plan on offering both of these courses, plus at least two more for next summer.  I also want to incorporate videos using eduCanon, which allows teachers to add  a video for students to view, then automatically pause the video to ask the students reflective questions.

Several participants commented on how they enjoyed the flexibility of online PD.  With summer vacations and those with extended work contracts, finding the time to complete PD on certain days is restricting, so a great solution is offering staff members a choice of options to complete their requirements.

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