Survey Says...

Lecherous Richard Dawson visions aside, I sent out my Fall Professional Development Survey to the staff of the middle and high school today. Here are the questions and the results:

What area of student improvement would you like to focus on this year?

Research Skills	25%
Personal Productivity and Organization	54%
Literacy and Storytelling	15%
Analytical Skills and Problem Solving	44%
Creativity and Expression	23%
Other, please specify	6%

Do you have a preference for the format of the classes?

Classes offered as single two-, to three-hour sessions	38%
Classes offered as several one-hour sessions.	29%
No preference.	35%

Which technologies or applications would you like to become more familiar with?

Wikis	46%
Blogs	38%
OnCourse	21%
Schoolwires	21%
Microsoft Office	17%
Unitedstreaming	48%
Podcasting or Screencasting	42%
Digital Storytelling	23%
Photography and Video	35%
Adobe Suite (Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator)	29%

Looking at these results, the list of classes I had planned takes new shape. While still in the early stages of development, I had planned on a major focus on subject specific courses with emphasis on collaboration. In planning the survey, I wanted to shift the focus away from tech-heavy topics, which is why I placed emphasis on student improvement, which I truly feel doubles as teacher improvement. For example, helping students create and nurture their own PLE's will no doubt push teachers to do the same, so a class that explains them must first show the teachers how to create a PLE.

I would love to hear how anyone else assesses the needs of your district in terms of professional development: survey? suggestion? mandate from administration?

On another note, the most uplifting part of this survey has got to be the interest we have generated in collaborative and connective tools like wikis and blogs. If you walked through our halls now, these words, which not too long ago were completely foreign, can be heard in conversation between colleagues.

A Not-So-Prescribed-View

Starting back at school is a rush for me. So much excitement and hope by both teachers and students alike. As I walked through our high school yesterday, I was besieged by a group of teachers who were recipients of tablet PC's this past summer and had undergone the beginnings of a series of professional development on how to teach with this machine at their disposal.

The questions were so unusual, as they pushed the envelope beyond what I had expected:

• Can we set up our skype accounts to work in class?
• How do import my presentations into Journal so I can write and highlight on them?
• What is a wiki?
• Are you offering any more courses on blogging?
• How do you screencast?

Yesterday, I thought about the barrage of tasks and questions that we are faced with as the year begins, most of them being of the mundane type: logins, access to software, licensing, projector hookups, SMARTboards, etc. But this new round of questions thrilled me to the core. Are we beginning to look at a new path?

I came across a post from Harold Jarche today in which he speaks about the difference between working hard and doing hard work. The questions I have begun to answer in my buildings seem to feel more like the hard work. Although they may initially be wrapped in the finer details of software and hardware, this group of teachers now has the ability to unshackle themselves from the confines of teacher-centrism and begin creating networked learning for themselves and their students. Jarche describes the difference like this:

Anyone can work hard, but it takes courage to take on the hard work of changing our communities, questioning the education system or creating a non-profit organisation with no guaranteed return on investment. Hard work is not about literacy, numeracy or even civics. Hard work is questioning underlying assumptions and seeing new patterns and then taking action on this knowledge. Critical thinking is not only hard work, but it’s difficult to teach and not easy to measure. No wonder schools avoid it.

Last year, I remember being thrilled to handle any of the old-guard type questions about access and logins, because everything was so new. One year later, and I marvel at how my thinking has changed and been challenged to change even more. Also, the first time I stood before the faculty of the high school and pitched the idea of a wiki was a classic memory that will stand to make me laugh heartily by the end of this year I am sure: a 1950's auditorium with an overhead projector, dim lights, and screenshots copied to laser printer transparencies, a staff looking at me like I was speaking Hawaiian (which, partly, I was), and crickets chirping as I finished telling them the times and dates of the classes I was offering.

These new questions, these new ideas coming from this small cadre of tablet teachers, will help me transform our pedagogy, even if we have to answer the old questions still.

Flickr photo credit to Alexanderdrachman's Photostream.

I'll take Eliot Smith, The Replacements, and Advanced Particle Physics Please

Explaining the significance of my stumbling onto iTunes University this weekend to my wife was pretty hilarious. She loves me and tolerates me, but it must have been too much for her to hear me signaling the end of the traditional college education as being upon us. We had a good laugh as I regaled her with tales of how much money we would save on the kids' college education. I mean, how much does 30GB iPod cost? Certainly much less than the loans I am still paying off.

iTunes University is a collection of podcasts and vodcasts created by university professors and made available for free. Free university lectures on topics that I can choose from? Unbelievable. This is where it begins to get interesting for me. I have always wanted to design my own course of study, and this begins to allow me to do that. Add this to the idea of a personal learning environment and I can begin to see how it is completely possible to be the driver, even more so than we can be now.

We are equipping some of our teachers with tablet PC's and wireless projectors next year, and in designing the things that I think they will need next year, this fits really well. I love that they can break from what they might have done in the past, i.e. show a movie, and break out Professor so-and-so from Vanderbilt who is discussing the very same topic they are learning about, but has a different spin, or better resources. Powerful.

Question: is it too intimidating?