Online Learning & DIY PD

I LOVE learning!  The process of exploring new information, developing new perspectives and

constructing knowledge is exciting.  I love hearing from other professionals and being inspired by their innovative ideas, so this was a natural extension of things that I make it a habit of doing.  I loved the idea from Joyce Valenza to create an infographic about my professional learning community to keep visible to remind myself and model for others.  I plan to laminate this and keep it next to my desk and use as the cover of my school binder.  Creating this also gave me the bonus opportunity to use The Noun Project website to download icons.
This year I have developed my Twitter community, using TweetDeck to better organize and curate my conversations.  I have also begun participating in Twitter Chats, and love these!!  I got started with the #2jennsbookclub first, and have since explored a variety of these chats moderated by organizations and people I follow, such as Future Ready Libraries, Jonathan Werner, and EdTech Teachers.
I am really excited about the offerings of BloomBoard.  I set up an account, saved multiple collections, and have started working through some of these.  The design of their Micro-Credentials program has also given me a lot of food for thought, and I am going to incorporate some of the structure they use in the Professional Learning courses I am offering at our school.

Webinars are another great way to expand learning opportunities, and there are so many to choose from out there!  I participated in one last night, hosted by the Future Ready Schools, on Hacking PBL.  There were some great, practical ideas shared.  I especially appreciated the conversation about assessment of projects and the tool they shared, called the "Progress Assessment Tool".  It is such a simple concept, but as I am currently wrestling with the place of grades and developing better models of feedback, this was very timely.
That's what I love about online learning and DIY PD, there is always something new to inspire us and take us to the next step in our thinking.

Resource Guides

Faculty Newsletters- Keeping Up!

I have been using Smore to create faculty newsletters for awhile now, but keeping up with gathering resources and sharing them is always a challenge.  Reading through the resources for this Thing made me connect the purposes of some tools that I use, but don't maximize for this purpose.  I use Feedly to organize my blogs, but I often neglect reading these, and then when I do read them there are so many that I get overwhelmed.  When I find something good to share I often forget to share it, because I'm not in "sharing mode" at that moment.  It seems so simple, but this Thing prompted me to schedule a time to read my Feedly each week, with a Smore open.
As I read through the blogs and explore new resources and ideas I create headings for anything that I think should be shared with our faculty.  I don't try to create the Smore at that time, but just gathering the ideas and resources.  Then, approximately once a month, I go back and write the full articles with links to resources, and share that with faculty.  This isn't a revolutionary idea, but it has allowed me to maximize the usefulness and efficiency of tools that I have been using.

Student Resource

This year I was looking for a solution to better support students with a research project in a class where it is difficult to schedule "in class" lesson time.  The teacher was willing to give me one day to launch the project with her, but I wanted to better support them with ongoing resources.  In order to do this I decided to use Google Sites to create a webpage of resources.  I wrote about using Google Sites in another blog post, but here I want to discuss how I gathered and organized resources.   I often organize and share resources with students through their classroom management site, Google Classroom, etc., but in this case I wanted to have a resource that was complete and could stand alone, and reflect the process and organization.  I created the I Search Project site with pages for each element of the paper and process.  This was a new type of project for them, but the elements drew on skills that I had worked on with them previously, so I wanted to make those connections.  I balanced new tools with familiar ones and packaged them in the language they would be using for this project.  It was a challenge to think about how they would be using these tools without direct instruction, but it made me really reflect on the usefulness and purpose of different tools.  I also tried to provide a variety of media types including videos, graphic organizers, and written explanation to benefit all student learning needs.  I really liked this process because of the reflective element, and the product feels like having a ready made tool kit.  I think that in the future I would like to create more of these resource sites, even when I will be more involved in the process, because it presents the resources in an easy to use and organized way.