Flipping Professional Development

Last spring, our technology committee completed a 5 year plan. I introduced it briefly to the faculty but what I needed was about a half a day to help them understand the goals and objectives and to discuss with peers what implementation would look like in the classroom. The intention was to do that at the beginning of this year but with a packed inservice week, it was decided teachers needed the time to get their classrooms ready and to try to meet with them on the tech plan over a couple of faculty meetings in October. Life happened and both of those were canceled. We were 4 months in to an implementation year and I had yet to meet with teachers. I was given a new faculty meeting date and I knew this would be my only time with the entire faculty for awhile so our time together needed to be productive. I decided to try a flipped model. Rather than standing up and reviewing the mission and vision of technology integration for our school and going through each of the 6 goals for students, I created a 10 minute video on Camtasia. Teachers were to watch this prior to our meeting so that our time together could be discussion, processing and planning. During our 40 minutes together, teachers worked in teams with their planning materials and the technology plan to discuss and share ways they have been integrating technology and how it was addressing specific goals as well as brainstorming ideas for upcoming units. During this time, myself and the Technology Champion, Matt Lipstein (@matthewlipstein) floated so we would be available for questions or to offer ideas.

I think this model for professional development has great potential. It was a first attempt and has lots of room for improvement but I think the teachers liked the collaboration time as an alternative to listening to me talk (I definitely preferred not doing that).

We did not have time to address the faculty goals on our plan or how we assess our progress on technology integration but that may be material for my next flipped PD.

I have included the video below. It is not a polished piece by any means but I had limited time to put it together. I think my next flipped PD will be improved!

http://www.screencast.com/t/27v7MauU