Online Professional Development

Hello Classroom 2.0ers!

We are looking into online professional development for teachers in New York City. I have experience several years back in unsuccessfully providing online professional development opportunities for teachers from my days at Teachers College, Columbia University. At that time many institutions were providing online opportunities for teachers but the market didn't seem to be there with this medium. K-12 teachers seemed to prefer face-to-face PD. I admittedly haven't spent as much time focusing on this today. We do have a license for Atomic Learning and it looks like Vicky Davis is offering some nice online workshops through that.

I'm wondering what others are doing for online learning and PD for teachers. I'd like to know:
What are you doing?
Are you building or buying?
What are you building or buying?
What type of classes are you offering?
Do teachers pay for the classes?
If so, how much?
Do the teachers get paid to take the classes?
If so, how much?
How do you track/credit the PD?
Anything else you think is important.

Thanks for your thoughts. Hopefully, this will inform many of us.

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Permalink Reply by Stu on June 10, 2008 at 9:04am

Lisa,

I am the Instructional Tech Coach for our district. Having completed my master's completely online, I was excited to use Moodle to offer my own online class for teachers. The topic: How to build a webpage using our in house web creation program (exponent php). I had MANY people show initial interest. 15 committed and 8 completed. Not what I was hoping for. It ran for 10 weeks with plenty of time to complete my "modules". They were to interact with each other and myself through discussion boards (that was a train wreck). It quickly became apparent that many of the participants saw this as an "easy" 15 hours of in-service. Others realized that they weren't as self directed as they thought.

On line learning is a tough critter. I would like to try it again, but I think I need SOME face to face time in the beginning to get people on the right track. To answer your questions...

Are you building or buying?
Moodle is technically free. But to have it installed and hosted through our local BOCES server is $3000 a year.

What are you building or buying?
Online classes and projects for teachers and students.

Do teachers pay for the classes?
No, and usually I would say THEY SHOULD BE PAID, but in this case, there was no buy in to the class. Nothing lost for not completing it.

Do the teachers get paid to take the classes? They should....and technically they do; after 15 hours of in service, they receive a credit on their base salary of $35. Not much of a motivator in this busy world we live in...

How do you track/credit the PD? Teacher Resource Center tracks and reports data.

Stu

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Permalink Reply by Lisa Nielsen on June 10, 2008 at 9:23am

Thanks Stu. This is helpful and similar to what I too found a few years back. I'll be curious if to know if others have had success with this medium for k-12 teacher PD.

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Permalink Reply by Tom Kennedy on June 10, 2008 at 10:40am

Hi Lisa,

My experiences are similar to Stu's, though I have had a short successful PD course in Copyright that all staff in our district have had to take for the past two years. I, too, am a Moodle fan. It's almost free, in that I run it on an older Linux PC and manage and administer it myself. Next year the district IT team will install it on our new Apple X-serve web server and will take over managing users through Active Directory.

This summer, with my Curriculum Director's help, I will be creating an online technology PD course. It is intended to provide teachers with the requisite number of CEU's they need in technology for recertification in CT. We will meet every month for one class period and in between they will be reading, interacting, and planning lessons that utilize the tools. I plan to concentrate on wikis, blogs, podcasts, etc. In order to get the CEU's they will have to keep logs of the time they devote to the modules, will be required to post to the class regularly, and present finished products in the form of lesson plans.

What are you doing? - Above
Are you building or buying? - Building
What are you building or buying? - Moodle
What type of classes are you offering? - Year long tech PD for total of 14 contact hours.
Do teachers pay for the classes? - No
If so, how much? NA
Do the teachers get paid to take the classes? - No, but they will be provided with the required CEU's they need.
If so, how much? NA
How do you track/credit the PD? - Logs and lesson plan submissions
Anything else you think is important. - This will be the first time that I will try something like this. I think it is important to stress collaboration and a sense of community during the face to face sessions, and then require online interaction as part of each module.

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Permalink Reply by Lisa Nielsen on June 30, 2008 at 11:58am

Thanks to all who have replied so far. Is anyone using Atomic Training, part of Atomic Learning, to deliver online PD?

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Permalink Reply by Sue Blackmon on July 1, 2008 at 2:55pm

Our district, in a suburb of Houston, offers atomic learning for students and teachers. It's really easy to use, but I don't know how successful it's been district-wide.
I'm not sure if this is something you could use, but the Poynter Institute in Florida has an online site called News University. www.newsu.org The site primarily focuses on training for journalists and journalism teachers and students; however, some of the lessons could apply to anyone who teaches writing or design. Some of the courses are free and some cost.