Love it when people I admire poke me in the face and challenge me to challenge others

via @davecormier "We learn from each other, through each other, from each other’s learning, from our ideas, our shared and unshared contexts and, maybe more importantly, we learn to continue to do this" http://davecormier.com/edblog/2010/06/17/community-as-curriculum-and-open-learning/ Powerful message, and something that I think  shifts conversations from content to process and back to content, tapping into our most powerful resource, each other.
It also reminds me that if we say there’s a “beginning” to the conversation we are implying an end, and that can be dangerously limiting.
Check out the video from Dave’s site

What are you investing in? People or Tools? Content or Community?

If you are investing in tools and programs while also cutting staff and people, you are missing it and blowing it! Is it crazy to invest in social media "expert" for your district instead. Someone that can navigate the waters of the world wide web, that can tap into the open learning community and can ask the right questions about where there may be more or better answers.

Now, I’m no genius; but it seems to me that someone who has the skills and capacity to link the vast amount of resources, conversations, keynotes, videos and more into a coherent and useable space, would cost you thousands less than a video delivery tool claiming to align pd, or a tool that “streams” video and also allows you to create antiquated a,b,c,d type of quizzes.
Or, maybe I am the one who is missing it and blowing it?
Just seems we prefer to buy things, than to invest in people that can build, maintain, design, and develop capacity.

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Vision and Intro statement for our e-learning online PD environment (Jargon alert) :)

Chop full of jargon and buzz words, here is our vision statement that will appear on the landing/front page of our Moodle (online Pd) LMS

Any time you say 21st century learning, just in time or always on, the shenanigans meter goes into overdrive, but I feel strongly that open sharing and collaboration will open up so many opportunities for our teachers!

Here it is, please be kind. J

Welcome to the next frontier of professional learning and development.

In DPS, we believe that learning is a collaborative and team sport. We believe that "just-in-time" and "always-on" learning can and should be an option for all professionals looking to study and grow. We believe that creating and nurturing a 21st century learning environment where this can take place is essential and vital to our work in the Office of Teacher Learning and Leadership. By capitalizing on our hyper-connectedness and possibilities that e-learning and today's tools bring, we can maximize near and far transfer in the classrooms; with student growth and success driving our e-learning community. We believe in an open model of design where organic course and resource creation enables and lifts up our teacher leaders and builds capacity for professional development in our district and beyond.

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Personal/Professional Google Account Connectivity

I for one send a lot of shared documents to co-workers via their work email address. This doesn’t always work out as cleanly as I hoped as many times “Google Accounts” are not synced/linked with your work email address. So one of two things usually happens, either the person I send the document to creates a new account with their work email (doesn’t really make sense to keep creating accounts, when do we check them?) Or the other solution is one of frustration, where the user never accesses the document and therefore misses out on the contribution possibilities. Below is a solution I recently shared with a couple of teams I work with, hoping that they will not meet the fate of one of the aformentioned results.
One “mistake” that I often see when sharing Google Documents across work and personal accounts is in the permissions setting. To insure that you will have access to any documents shared to your work address taking the initial step of adding another email address to your account solves this.

To do this you will need to:

• sign in to your account
• click on settings

• click on account settings

• click on edit email settings

 

• then click on “add an additional email address”

 

Lastly confirm the new address. This should allow you to access all documents sent to your “work” email address via your Google account

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PD design Team focusing questions for the meetings ahead of us

I like these ideas in particular, and I think they align with our conversations we’ve been having:

• How does the score on a teacher evaluation rubric trigger PD? 

• And what types of PD does it trigger? 
• What are the options?

• How should a year-long personal Pd plan be developed? 

• What should be included in it? 
• What data is it based on? 
• Who is part of the conversation? 

However, I worry about being bogged down in the minutia of accountability and where that falls w/o looking at models that explicitly address that piece. I think it can be part of a conversation down the road, but maybe the team’s focus should be around Pd connectivity, data, and “personalization.”

Am I off base here?

What do you think?

"Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn." - Benjamin Franklin

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