Last January, I had a conversation with
John Pederson, at the
Educon 2.1 conference in Philadelphia about
Powerful Learning Practice, a "
a long-term, job-embedded professional development program that immerses them (participants) in 21st century learning environments", developed by
Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach and
Will Richardson. He was trying to put together a cohort of districts in Wisconsin, and had asked Will and Sheryl if he could include districts from Minnesota as well to get the the optimal number of participants. Since I was from Minnesota, he wondered if I would be interested or know of other districts that were interested in participating?After pitching it back in Edina and getting the go ahead to proceed, I presented the opportunity to the TIES Learning and Technology Advisory group, and after a lot of conversations and the inclusion of a great group of educators from New Hampshire, tomorrow we kick off the cohort in Oregon, Wisconsin!
Our team consists of our two 21st Century Literacy teachers, Heather Good and Anna Jankowski, 7th Grade science teacher Tim Ronhovde, 9th grade government teacher
Claude Sigmund, and high school math teacher
Katie Russell.
At dinner tonight, after describing our district's technology initiatives, Will said that it sounded like we might be farther along than others with the embrace of Web 2.0, the use of social tools and the publishing of student work. In reality, while there are pockets of teachers utilizing these tools for learning, I think we are still in the early stages of adoption. While I appreciated his thoughts, I hope our experience in PLP this year moves teachers in our district from integrating these tools into their instruction toward student's integrating these tools to become connected learners!
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