I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I believe the task of sharing CLT with my staff will definitely bring some heads out of the clouds. I've witnessed really "tech savvy" staff with what they consider wonderful multimedia presentations that I would never have admitted that I created. Although these teachers are excellent teachers, I don't believe they are applying their prior knowledge about good teaching practices to materials that are created with technology. I too am guilty of doing this. I wanted to use technology so badly that I created busy and overwhelming materials that in retrospect weren't necessarily great teaching materials. And then, I took an online class at a university about creating powerful presentations without excess. This changed my entire perspective and I was reminded of these components when we discussed Cognitive Learning Theory this week. My approach to my staff? I'm thinking I would show them a presentation that was full of fluff. And then, ask them what the content was. I'm not sure how much they would get from it, but, I would hope to expand the discussion to what would they change about the presentation so that they could better understand the content. I would then introduce the components of CLT and ask the staff to establish some criteria for representations using the fundamentals of CLT. I believe this approach would be well received by my staff. I know there would need to be follow-up as teachers begin to apply what they learned in their classroom, however I believe it'd be a great start.
And, coming out of the clouds...well, let's just say it's all in efforts to view a bright new day.
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Like several of your colleagues in the cohort, this is a good plan for staff development (give them the fluffy presentation and see what they recall.)
So is blogging prohibited in HC?
I don't know if it is prohibited in HC but, people are definitely walking on eggshells about the security side of anything online. And no formal guidelines have been established for online activities at the ES level. Most schools create something of their own...but it must have the support/approval of the administration. My administrators were not supportive of creating an acceptable use policy for students. Some school systems have school generated email...this has not been made available to students in HC. To my understanding, blogging, wikis, email and the likes are all generally done off campus during non-school hours. I plan to toy around with gaggle.net next year with my older students in efforts to teach email etiquette and gaggle does offer a blog option. Hopefully we'll have a chance to learn a little about that too.
What has been your experience with blogging and the likes in k-12 education?
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