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Professional Development Initiatives at Southern Regional With the stage set, Southern's professional development program in technology was built on a strong foundation of teacher institutes and professional development initiatives of the past. Many of this initiatives are listed below. During the 2000-2001 school year a new state mandate will be in place that requires all teachers in New Jersey must take one-hundred hours of professional development over a five year period. In order to tailor our overall professional development program to the needs of the staff, we conducted a survey from which next year's offerings will be developed Computer in the Classroom Computers are not simply placed in classrooms. Teachers must demonstrate both a sufficient comfort level with technology and an understanding of how to use it as curriculum tool. This is done through self-assessment, the completion of skills courses, OII based courses, and three critical courses based on Tom March's work that utilize Web-and-Flow. All of the courses are delivered in a variety of formats that meet the diverse of needs of staff. For example, the Web-and-Flow course are delivered in the following ways. 1) A three-four day course during the summer Teacher Training Institutes Southern offers a wide range of professional development opportunities. Summer, Fall and Spring institutes offer opportunities to take course for credit tied to increases on the Southern pay scale. Summer Institutes often feature nationally known presenters. You can get an idea of how Southern's Institute program has grown by comparing the course catalogs from the summer of 1990 and 1996, with the fall of 1999. Note: Even though the Fall, Winter, and Spring offerings are always fewer than the summer offerings, the number of technology related courses is equal or greater in 1999 than any previous year. As you examine the course offerings over the three years, you will notice an evolutionary as technology courses increase in quantity and move from being skills based to curricular based, from learning software to learning how to apply the technology within the context of the curriculum. Four Directions for Lifelong Learning Activities and philosophy from OII's Four Directions are interspersed throughout Southern's training and material from these pages are incorporated in all of our Internet offerings. Teacher who need a quick way of getting up to speed on the creation of quality web based curriculum can learn the basics and begin posting their work to the web by using Tom March's philosophy and Filamentality, a tool for creating web based lessons without html. This is a free tool created by Tom and Jodi Reed while fellows at Pac Bell. It was used by Southern prior to the existence of Web-and-Flow. Web-and-Flow Tom March's online professional development community provides the focus for Southern's technology infusion efforts It provides teachers with a clear picture of the type of activities they can create based on their comfort with the web and their teaching style. It facilitates the process by providing a way for teachers to create these activities while making the technology as transparent as possible. Described by Tom as Filamentality on steroids. This is a fee based program to which the district subscribes, is very cost effective. The WebQuest format, created by Bernie Dodge and Tom March at the University of San Diego has quickly become the standard for the creation of authentic, web based, collaborative problem solving activities. Southern's ultimate goal is to have teachers transform their teaching to student centered activities and to use WebQuests as one of the major vehicles for creating such activities. Since the summer of 1996, Southern Regional has used O'Reilly WebBoard conferencing software. Teachers receiving training are provided with their own conference area. This area is under teacher control. They have the power to add and delete users, edit and control messages, create additional conferences, determine who sees and has access to the conferences and many other administrative functions. This sort of control is seen as critical for two reasons. First, a system administrator could never keep up with the constantly changing needs of a large faculty. Second, if teachers are going to utilize technology as a tool, they must be able to assume ownership and control of the tool. However, there is a greater need to establish a more supportive and powerful collaborative online environment. Conferencing no longer fulfills the communications and collaborative needs of the district. During the 1999-2000 school year, Southern experimented with FirstClass Collaborative Classroom and will be evaluating it this summer of 2000 to determine whether it will be the environment to take us well into the 21st century. There are two phrases that my students got tired of hearing, but both phrases are key to Southern's philosophy of web pager creating. .
1) Educational web pages must be food for the mind, not just cotton candy for the eyes. Web publishing is much more that learning how to create pages, just as print publishing is much more than learning how to spell words. There are copyright issues, permission to publish issues, proper use of the medium and a host of other topics that should be addressed before attempting to post web pages in an educational setting. During the 1999 school year, the web publishing course for teachers was replaced by a course named Supercharging Web and Flow. Web publishing is taught as a method of enhancing projects created with Web and Flow. Southern is making the move to the web on two fronts. First, a new course, Advanced Web Publishing, was established. Students in this class have completely redesigned the Southern web site, archiving some material, reorganizing the rest, and adding new content. During the 2000 school year, 20 key teachers were provided with a two-day release time workshop for DreamWeaver software by Macromedia. Some of these teachers are utilizing their new skills to upgrade their existing web sites and others will take over departmental web sections on the new Southern site. One-on-one and small group instruction and mentoring is used to assist teachers in designing assessments, WebQuests and other web based learning experiences. This summer teams of teachers will be offered the opportunity to participate in Summer Institutes to develop web based activities. In 1998, E-mail basics were taught in a short 1-hour introductory course as well as through for credit course in teacher institutes. Teachers then become part of RamPower, Southern's district-wide mailing list, where they receive additional online instruction, mentoring, and support. In 1999, Uncle Ram's war on digital illiteracy was declared with the objective of getting as many teachers online as possible by the millennium. This course utilizes mentoring of teachers who got online last year, a web tutorial created for the campaign, and through Emily. In 1998, two teachers were involved in Steven's Institute K-12 initiative where they participate in twelve days of professional development designed to help them integrate Internet into their curriculum. They also participated in teacher institutes and core courses. In 1999, these two teachers along with others are taking over some of the courses taught by me last year. This frees me up to begin a new initiative and teach two new courses. "Classrooms: Connections to the Future" grant program. The program has two major objectives: Science and math teachers are using state of the art software and authentic tasks to learn how to create a hand-on learning environment that challenges students to do their best. This online program from the Concord Consortium has been very successful because of the dedication of staff and administration, who meet weekly face-to-face to discuss the online and classroom activities. Gardner's multiple intelligences theory have been a part of Southern's Summer Institutes. This school year more teachers are learning about the theories by participating in the ASCD online professional development series. As part of a Comps for Kids grant that brought 128 Pentium II computers to Southern, 21 teachers are receiving three days of training from the Educational Improvement Resource Center. |
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