14 Hour Web 2.0 PD Course

I am formulating some ideas for a blended online course for middle school teachers on Web 2.0/Social Network Tools. Our state (CT) requires 14 hours of CEU's in technology as part of a teacher's re-certification process. I want to provide teachers with the opportunity to meet the requirement over the course of one school year.

Here is the plan so far:

Introduce a topic (wikis for instance) in a face to face 45 min. workshop.
Direct participants to a Moodle installation with additional resources, readings, activities, quiz, etc to be completed by the next meeting about 4 weeks later.
Follow-up discussion about value of the tool, brainstorming uses, etc
To be awarded CEU's staff would have to present a lesson plan or narrative describing how they intend to use the tool with their class.

Total estimated time: 4 hours per topic (including face to face intro)

My questions:
1. What tools do you consider essential? (I want to limit it to about 3-4 topics.)
2. What order would you present them in?

Other suggestions appreciated. Thanks for your input.

Tags: pd, professional development, workshop

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Permalink Reply by Christy Tucker on April 26, 2008 at 12:21pm

My 3 essential tools would be blogs, RSS, and wikis, introduced in that order. All of these have applications for both personal learning and with students. The RSS is especially important because it's what helps you keep track of the rest of it. A teacher who tries to do student blogs without using RSS to keep track of what students are saying is likely to feel overwhelmed.

Can you talk about ways these tools can be used by the teachers themselves to connect with other teachers and for their own personal learning, or are you focusing solely on classroom applications?

If you have time for another topic, I would pick something with multimedia or images--Flickr, podcasts, TeacherTube/YouTube, etc. It might be more helpful for them to talk about ways to learn new technologies and keep up with what's happening than to just teach a single fourth tool though.

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Permalink Reply by Tom Kennedy on April 27, 2008 at 4:21am

Christy,
Thanks for the feedback. Good suggestions, especially the teachers using the tools for professional or personal learning. Podcasting would be a great fourth topic.