"Professional Development Like No Other"
UPDATE: We're also offering 'taster' visits to our school. Come for a couple of hours and get a feel for what we're doing. Contact @anneknock (aknock @ nbcs.nsw.edu.au). Now on with the show:
A dream of mine going back years has finally come to fruition!
My school is launching, no HAS LAUNCHED a professional development academy! We even have accreditation from the NSW Institute of Teachers so it's official!
Before I go further, here are the details, dates, and rego forms: Download SCIL PD Schedule 2010
COME YE COME YE! Come one, come all! Our vision: PD LIKE NO OTHER!
I personally taken the 'best stuff' from everything I've been working on for the past three years - virtual worlds, Beyond Borders collaborative student networks, and the 'Real Audience Project' (students publishing to the web, publishing their own print books, publishing a live internet radio station) and will be running full day workshops once a fortnight from next term through to the end of the year! All the stuff I blog about, I can now work with you, hands-on!
We're also running courses on using Moodle (We know how to use Moodle in ways that work. We adopted Moodle back in 2005 and almost all our teachers are highly proficient with it. We even have a large online study arm of the school http://hsconline.nsw.edu.au/ using Moodle for distance ed. ).
And what we call the "Learning Matrix". Imagine 140 students, 6 teachers, and heaps of computers thrown into one big wall-less learning space where students self-select into activities and take responsibility for their own learning journey. We've been doing this for three years, and the results are astonishing. COME AND SEE! We'll show you how we did it and how you might adopt similar structures. The results have been spectacular, both students AND teachers. "Conflict" is so often the defining feature of a classroom - but not any more, which is why our teachers are delighted, and the students getting on with the job.
Our vision: Professional development, like no other.
The people running the PD are teachers who are currently implementing the practices they are training. Teachers like me, and my highly esteemed colleagues. Our workshops will be peppered with "last Thursday when we did this, we discovered..."
The PD will involve observation of real classes of students so attendees can see the ideas in action.
The PD will be hands on, and practical from the start of the day, with a clear action plan and timeline in place for you to take away and implement.
The PD will be structured to encourage networking and ideas sharing, based on our common experiences of what it is like at the coalface of teaching, where the loftiest of ideas gets smashed against reality!
Each workshop day will also be just the beginning a journey, with attendees invited into a support network that continues to touch base, exchange ideas, failures, and triumphs in the following weeks and months. In every workshop we will be promoting the big idea of teaching - it is not a job, not a career, definitely a calling, but on top of that it is a GLOBAL MOVEMENT OF SOCIAL IMPROVEMENT. We are part of something bigger than just our local school. This thought is energising!
As you can see I am very excited by it all.
Please, spread the word about this! And come, come in droves and let's work together!