Building Your PLN Through Twitter

This week is the official start of the OKCPS ETS Summer Ed Tech Learning Challenge. This is a four week, 100% online PD during the month of June. Each week a new ed tech challenge is presented to participants via the OKCPS ETS blog. Then participants have the entire week to complete the challenge and post an accountability post on Twitter. 

The first week's challenge was to create a professional Twitter account. We want to increase the number of district staff members engaged on Twitter. We also want them to experience the benefits of Twitter, especially related to sharing resources and ideas.

As an extension activity this week, we asked participants already active on Twitter to share 3-5 of their favorite people to follow. I chose to share @gcouros because I am reading the Innovator's Mindset (you should read it if you have not!) I also enjoy following @LeadUpNow and it's thoughts about educational leadership. Finally, I mentioned @ShakeUpLearning since her Google stuff is too cool!

Don't forget to follow the hashtag #OKCPSetlc to see all of the cool things our staff members are learning in June. Also be on the look out for the Back to School ETLC and School Webmaster ETLC, both in July!

Summer Ed Tech Learning Challenge 2016

This summer my department is organizing an ed tech learning challenge for teachers. The professional development course is 100% online. Each week teachers will be provided a challenge with resources to complete the challenge. Once they complete the challenge, they will tweet a comment about the challenge on their Twitter account for accountability as well as to share successes! 

To learn more about this challenge, visit our OKCPS ETS blog.

~Happy Learning~

Summer Ed Tech Learning Challenge

I had the idea of an ed tech learning challenge after participating in Todd Nesloney's Summer Learning Series in  2014. Our district has low participation in professional development because it is not required and there are no or low expectations for it. I wanted to create a personal learning opportunity which would not be too time consuming, would be engaging and provide resources to use today! Selfishly, I love Twitter and get SO many resources and ideas from my PLN. Naturally, I wanted to involve Twitter in this learning challenge as well.

I decided to create 4 challenges for participants to complete over 4 weeks. We presented 1 challenge per week. We started with Twitter so we could utilize it in each of the following challenges. We also created a hashtag #etlc2015 to track participation and encourage communication and collaboration. Since we are a GAFE district we used Google Classroom to relay each challenge, encourage comments and post announcements.

I was pleasantly surprised to have 100 participants sign up in May. We had 65 active participants and will have 40 participants complete all challenges by July 31st. For a district with no professional development expectations, I consider this a success!

Educational Technology Learning Challenge

Whoa...what is an Ed Tech Learning Challenge??? This is a series of tasks, or challenges, presented to staff members. The participants learn how to use and integrate new technologies in the classroom.

This semester I am working with one elementary campus over 12 week. We started out working through the SAMR model using ipads. Next we moved to Google Drive and now we are working with SMART Notebook and SMART Boards. We just completed week 6 this week. The next 6 weeks will include flipping, coding, project based learning, social media and more ipads.

The conclusion of the challenge will be a peer showcase so we can all show what we learned and how we customized it for our classroom and students.This campus has a great staff and is a joy to work with every week!

I will post more after the peer showcase. There will be some amazing sharing at that time!