I detected a measure of dread in all of us this week as we contemplated teaching teachers. Not for lack of things to teach them, or enthusiasm for the content, but for what we had experienced of them as students. Funny.
It seemed clear to me, given my faculty and grade level, to choose the basic tools that could serve across the curriculum and be used again and again, both by teachers and students. Although I included some of the more specialized applications - FlickR, Bubbl.Us, Doodle - in my plan, it was really the basic stuff like a Google account, blogs and wikis that I wanted to get across to them and, hopefully, to their students.
For the presentation itself, I simply made an outline. That's how I teach, and how I argued as an appellate lawyer. I don't want to be squinting at notes or a script when I'm in front of people with limited time, but I don't want to forget the main points, either. An outline always works for me.
As with the students I have taught online applications to so far, I wanted to spend as little time lecturing as possible and as much time as possible having the teachers play with and create the chosen product. In this case, a blog. That way, I would be available to help troubleshoot if they stumbled. I wanted them to walk away with something, and feel like they had mastered something new.
Unlike students, I did feel the need to spend more time up front justifying what they were about to learn. To that end, I frontloaded the presentation with Common Craft video and examples of great teacher/classroom blogs to whet their appetites.
Nice point about giving them lots of hands-on time. It is a slippery slope because the people who set up PD often want you to push a lot of product, but the participants always seem to appreciate time to get used to the content on their own.
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