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Here is a quick peek as some of the professional development initiatives
being instituted at Southern Regional.
Tier Training
Four Directions for Lifelong Learning
Tom March's Ozline
Summer Institutes
OII Workshop Modules
Big 6 Problem Solving
Filamentality
WebQuests
Web Conferencing & Chat
Web Publishing
Project Planning
E-mail Blitz
Stevens Institute
Goals 2000
INTEC
ASCD
EIRC
Web-and Flow
Zebu
Resource Links
Tier Training
Teacher who complete Tier I, II, and III training qualify to placed on a list to receive three computers for their classroom. This is in addition to the teacher station scheduled to be in each room by the end of the 1999-2000 school year.
Beginning with Summer Institute in 1999, Tier Training will be eliminated at Southern in favor of a more flexible, modular approach. The modules are being developed by OII as a way of meeting the diverse needs of schools and teachers at different points in the technology adoption continuum.
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 looking at the course catalogs from the summer of 1990 and 1996.
Four Directions for Lifelong Learning
Activities and philosophy from OII's Four Directions are interspersed throughout Southern's training and are an integral part of Tier Training.
Tom March, one of the co-creators of WebQuests has made his philosophy of web based education available at his Ozline web site. Tom's material and OII's Four Directions for Lifelong Learning were based on common pedagogy. As a result OII and Southern began to incorporate Tom's material into professional development efforts. We are looking forward to a continued, productive association.
During the coming year greater emphasis will be placed on developing Information Technology Teams with the Library Media Specialist as the catalyst for information activities in the schools' media centers. Mike Eisenberg's Big 6 approach to problem solving and research will be featured as one method of developing research based products.
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.
The WebQuest format, created by Bernie Dodge at the University of San Diego has quickly become the standard for the creation of authentic, web based, collaborative problem solving activities. Tier Training'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.
Southern Regional uses 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.
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 should be food for the mind, not cotton candy for the eyes.
2) Less is more
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.
Teachers are offered a variety of ways to publish activities on the web. The include Filamentality, Web-and-Flow, web page creation using Netscape Composer, and Zebu.
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.
E-mail basics are taught in a short 1-hour introductory course. Teachers then become part of RamPower, Southern's district-wide mailing list, where they receive additional online instruction, mentoring, and support.
Some teachers are 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.
"Classrooms: Connections to the Future" grant program. The program has two major objectives:
1. Become a staff development site for school districts in the southern part of the state for projects that make use of the available video conferencing technology.
2. Enhance the district curriculum by providing students with the opportunity to participate in "electronic field trips" and interactive learning experiences through video linkup with other sites.
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.
Web-and Flow is a new site being announced at NECC. I was created by Tom March and Jodi Reed, who also created Filamentality and the Pac Bell Blue Web'N site. It offers teachers a way of learning and publishing high quality web based activities for their students.
Zebu is revolutionary online collaborative authoring software that allows teachers and/or students to work together online, sharing and editing the same web documents. Teachers have control over the work environment, allowing them to give limited or free access to projects and to determine the amount of editing power their project participants may have. Zebu is being used by OII in some of its training sessions and on projects with other organizations, such as Carnegie Hall, where it is being used to prototype content for the redesign of their web site.
Resource Links
Since 1995, OII has been collecting resources to use in their workshops. Literally thousands of links have been collected, edited, and updated to provide districts with a great variety of quality resources to meet their needs and to serve as starting points for curriculum work and professional development. OII provides this page for use by its workshop participants. This is a bookmark page. It may be used as a web page or downloaded and imported it into Netscape for use in the districts of OII participants. Other use or distribution is not permitted without permission of from OII.