Today, teachers are learning at RCS. We have a staff development day and our teachers and their learning are as much on my mind this morning as my students were in my head when I was teaching. I’m thinking about the 7-12 teachers who will be in a Tech Work Session from 8-11 and about the PreK-6 teachers I’ll be with during that time as we learn more about Thoughtful Classroom strategies. Then my mind goes straight to the afternoon sessions with PreK-6 in a Tech Work Session and 7-12 in data analysis.
For my 7-12 teachers, I hope they use the tech time effectively-at whatever point they may be at with technology. First, I hope they’ll realize how powerful a tool our school website can be in communicating who we are, what we’re about, and what’s happening at RCS. Much of the time teachers just want to do their thing without thinking about how they can communicate that to the school community. What’s lost in that idea is the incredible opportunity to showcase our kids and the powerful learning that goes on here every day. What’s left is the perception a community gets of a school with little direct communication about learning. Let’s use the website to illustrate the learning that’s happening, to remind our kids (and parents) of homework and tests, to link to our YouTube videos created in class of the pig dissections or whatever, to show the interviews our kids are conducting on “service” workers. Let’s turn it up Randolph teachers and strut your stuff on the website.
Second, if teachers are alreading rocking the website, I hope they focus on their own learning today. Set up RSS feeds, edit the ones you already have, look for new sources of learning, new voices to read. Try Twitter and see if that works for you, or Ning, or any of the other tools Mark Carls and Mike Frame help you with today. We grow as teachers and get better when we spend time listening and learning and hearing someone’s voice besides our own.
And we’re learning strategies for working with children with autism today from Mary Rockey and meeting with colleagues about our curriculum on teams. I hope our PreK-6 teachers walk away from our Thoughtful Classroom session with a better understanding of how our kids learn and some strategies to change it up a bit in their own classrooms tomorrow. And for just a little while, I get to be a teacher again.
Teachers Learning about Learning. Gotta love it.
Too cool that youtube is an option in your district. Ours blocks almost all blogs and youtube. I understand the need to keep students safe, but I’d rather educate them on how to safely use the tools, rather than throwing out the tools. I have used teachertube, but download time can be a killer!
Thanks again for the blog post to focus us today. I think everyone had time to at least update their webpage and to ‘spice’ it up a little. We did talk a little bit about RSS feed and Google Reader as well as Google Alerts for key words in the morning.
Didn’t quite get to Twitter, but I’m more than willing to share those ideas or any of the other ones I have on my own Randolph page: http://randolphcsd.org/webpages/mcarls/
I’ll especially look to help teachers make any National/Global Connections, plus keep the SMARTBoard section updated.
Thanks again for having me out here today with your teachers.