staff development

A friend of mine and I are planning a staff development for our school. We've been given two hours in which to work. So, we promptly divided our session into three one hour blocks. LOL

Actually, it will work. The second half of the session is divided into two groups, and everybody can choose where to go based on their comfort level with technology, or their interest in the topics being covered.

My friend and I worked for several hours the other day planning this out. We have a fairly good skeleton of what we're doing now. We kept getting sidetracked with all the really cool things we could do, and finding that we needed to bring ourselves back into : What do we really hope to accomplish? What is feasible for the time frame?

The first half of the session will be a basic intro. We have two questions that we're going to ask each small group to brainstorm. 1. What are some of the benefits you can think of with technology in the classroom? 2. What are some of the roadblocks to using it?

After the small group brainstorms, we will go to a large group discussion on the topic.

After that, we will do a brief brainstorm on how to use the internet in a classroom setting safely and responsibly (i.e. internet safety, and teacher management)

Then the group will divide into two groups. My session will talk about some of the tools that require very little learning curve and will provide instant resources to teachers. I plan on having everybody make a track at trackstar, and a delicious account to track the sites we go to. Other than that, I just want to show some good, generally useful sites like google lit.

It was great working collaboratively like that, right up until I realized that I go back to work next week!!!