My Very Own PD Day with Chris Craft

We had an inservice day today - teachers actually visited schools of their choice. This was not your typical day of meetings that may-or-may-not be geared toward your needs of professional development. I jumped at the chance to find a school/teacher experienced in integrating web 2.0 tools in their curriculum. Although a tad over my elementary level, I found an excellent resource not too far away from home in Mr. Chris Craft. Many of us who have researched international collaboration projects have seen much of his work and read his blog http://www.crucialthought.com/

Chris Craft (love the name) came highly recommended and it was all true and then some. I got to see him in his element and I must say - his students adore and respect him. All of his sixth graders came in calmly with smiles and stayed that way the entire time. What wonderful classroom spirit. He loves them and they know it. He respects their identities and their uniqueness and they know that too. After all of the techno-talk I absorbed, I was struck most by his manner about his students and one quote in particular. "I teach children how they want to be taught," he told me. Think about that some more.

What about the techie talk? I learned more about Moodle, PBwiki, Gcast, WordPress, and Google Earth. New for me are great video resources from Dan Meyer at http://blog.mrmeyer.com/, www.trymango.com for self-paced Spanish lessons, www.livemocha.com , WiziQ for a virtual classroom, and bluehost . So many tools...and it is not summer break.

We talked about EdTech 2007 - SC's technology conference October 24-26. We are both presenting. My presentation is "We Vote for Movie Making! Motivate your students using cameras and Classroom Performance System (CPS). " I submitted this before jumped on the Web 2.0 trail, so now I'll tweak it more to include some.

One of Chistopher Craft's (this how his name is listed on the site) presentation is about presentation design - how cool is that? Another is about Google Earth - yeah! The third is presenting his research "Games and Simulations, is there a place in k12 education? " What a fountain of information he so generously shares.

What a jam-packed Professional Development day for me! What did you do on your last inservice day?