 Welcome to the K-12 online conference 2015. I'm Dr. Deverey Rogers, and I'm sharing with you what's virtually possible through online professional development. What's virtually possible in high quality, free online professional development. So that you can know who's sharing information with you, I've had 20 years of experience in education at the elementary, secondary, and post-secondary levels. I've also been an education administrator. I'm Google certified, a master Intel instructor, and a leading edge certified administrator. If you'd like to find out more about me, you can use your QR code reader to go to my website or simply type it in, DevereyRogers.com. And feel free to tweet me throughout the presentation and even afterwards as you become part of my professional learning network. You can tweet me at d underscore educator, at d underscore educator. You can find this session at the K-12 online conference website as well as this promo link. You can find our back channel for this session at this tiny URL. I encourage you to open up another browser, window, or another tab in order to access this back channel so that you can pause your video every now and then and be able to respond to some of the questions that I have throughout the presentation and also so that you can share any ideas, comments, or resources that you might have in regards to online professional development. And again, don't forget to tweet me. So today, I'm going to cover the what, the why, and the how of online professional development. What is PD? Why do we do PD? And how we can do PD through professional learning networks, both traditionally and virtually. I'll speak about all of these learning modes and the way that I will present it is by going deeply into one site that I have for each of them or one organization that I have for each of them and then providing you with the links for other recommended sites. First, I'd like to tap into your prior knowledge. What do you already know about online professional development? I'm using AnswerGarden at this URL if you need to pause the video so that you can get to this URL and be able to answer this question. What do you already know about online professional development, any PD sites and any supports? Once you type in your 20 character answer here, you'll submit. It works like a word cloud. You'll be able to see your answers and other people's answers popping up here. And then if you decide that you agree with one, you simply click on it and then the number changes and then that particular word or phrase becomes larger and larger so that we can see what other people already know about online professional development. So when we define PD, professional development may be used in reference to a wide variety of specialized training, formal education or advanced professional learning intended to help administrators, teachers and other educators improve their professional knowledge, competence, skill and effectiveness. The research says that teachers who receive substantial professional development, that's at an average of 49 hours a year, can boost their students achievement by about 21 percentile points. I know that we don't teach towards the test, but when we assess students learning, that is a great growth point for people who receive substantial professional development. A research synthesis confirms the difficulty of translating the PD into student achievement gains despite the intuitive and logical connection, meaning that professional development that we get is not necessarily applied to the classroom. Maybe sometimes because they're given one workshop function, maybe because the learning that we have as teachers does not necessarily go in an inquiry cycle so that we can see how it is applied to students and if that's actually working to come back and talk about that. You can read more of Gusky's research, who is right now one of the gurus around professional development for education. The research also says that international evidence suggests that educational reforms progress depends on teachers' individual and collective capacity and is linked with school-wide capacity for promoting pupils' learning, again, what you learn and what's going on in the school and how it's supported. Building capacity is therefore critical. Developing professional learning communities appears to hold considerable promise for capacity building for sustainable improvement. Online, we can build professional learning networks, so that's something that we're going to talk about. Essentially, professional development equals student success if it's connected and collaborative. So again, use our back channel in order to respond to how you can use this knowledge. How are you then able to use the knowledge that the research is sharing with us in what you will be doing in your own work environment? This is our back channel, simple Google Doc. Or again, you can tweet me at The Educator. So a PLN, a personal or professional learning network is a potentially promising pedagogical approach for both integrating formal and informal learning using social media and supporting students' self-regulated learning. A PLN, theoretically, is using connectivism because we're able to connect with one another and share our differing perspectives. It's the power of we instead of me. I might be an expert in a particular field, but when I connect with you and then we share our thoughts and our agreements and our ideas and our practices, then we have an exponential power building. So we're sharing within this community of practice. All educators are experts in something. So then we're able to share those things with one another. A PLN is basically do-it-yourself mentoring. So as a network teacher, you may use some of these digital tools that I'll talk about. But then we're also using our family and local community, popular media, our colleagues, and curriculum documents that we're very accustomed to. So as long as we're connecting, we're building personal learning networks. So now I'll begin to talk about some of the, excuse me, some of the online professional development that you can engage in with your colleagues or by yourself. But nevertheless, if you're doing it by yourself, that you connect again online so that you can build that PLN. Of these, there's K-12 online. All of these are linked so that when you access the presentation that you can click on them yourself. There's K-12 online, Google Education on Air, Smithsonian online conference series. This is Teacher Leading Teachers Conference, the Arts Online Conference, the 14 virtual conference out of the University of Michigan, Global Education Conference, and then the CO. This is CO-14, but for year 2015 it'll be CO-15, CO-16, etc., etc. I'm only going to focus on one and I've decided that I'm going to focus on EdCamp Global. We all know EdCamps for being unconferences. And if you don't know about EdCamps, by all means Google Unconference. But EdCamps are usually held face to face. 2015 was the first year that they held one online. So again, an unconference is when teachers come up with the topics that they feel that they want to learn about and then facilitators or even the teachers themselves are the facilitators of those sessions in order to share out. So the schedule is presently being built for the 2016 conference and I just want to show you basically how this works. So in any online conference you should be able to access the schedule to see what you can learn and how you can learn it. So you can learn these through Twitter chats, Google Hangouts, Voxers, Periscopes, Google Classroom, Google Docs and Slides. Those are the ways that you can access the learning. And you can see as the schedule is building up that you have someone teaching through Google Classroom, excuse me, through the Twitter chat about global classrooms and the power of social media. You have someone teaching through a Google Hangout about sharing French as a second language in poetry on the elementary level, etc, etc. So there's always something for each teacher in any online conference. Again, you can access any of these from this particular presentation on this slide simply by clicking on it. When we come to Webazines, Webazines are basically your online magazines. Online magazines. I suggest these sites and then you can always make your own Webazine through paperly or through scoping. Again, I'm just going to go into one of them and I've decided to go into Education Next. As you can see, it's an online magazine. You basically call it a website. The reason that it's a magazine is because it has the ads, it has the articles, it has videos, it has multimedia embedded into it. This is a good way that you can get a lot of different types of media coming at you for lots of different topics that affect educators. I might want to go into multimedia simply because it's an online magazine. And then here, if I don't see something from this week that I want to focus on, so they're focusing on strong K-12 leaders from within their book club, the last conference they had, I can always go to the video archive. On every Webazine, there's the video archive, podcast archive, and then I can then see things that were presented before and then I can go in and watch it or listen to it in order to gather more professional development. So again, once you access this presentation, then you can link out to any of these. But then there are professional organizations. Our professional organizations are basically what disciplines we have decided to focus on and then what national or state organizations there are to support that. So I have the disciplines listed on this side and then I have some of the national umbrella organizations on this side. So I've decided to focus on, I believe that is ASCD, curriculum and development. Yes, the Association of Curriculum and Development. As you can see, when I go into any of the national organization sites, they basically look the same. So they have books and publications somewhere, they have things around their conferences somewhere, then they have professional development. I think books and publications are professional development as well. I think when I go to any conference, any face-to-face conference or online conference, but even from the face-to-face conferences, they have some sessions recorded in which you can access, but then there's also professional development. Some professional development you have to pay for and then some of it is free. So depending on what organization you go into, the formatting may look a little different, but all the information will be there. And then you can always gather professional development, clicking on a video, looking at some webinars, web series, etc., etc. Or again, you can come to my presentation and you can click on any one of these in which I've linked directly to professional development pages. So again, I would like to have your feedback and I think that it's good for building a professional learning community if you were to go to the back channel. And the back channel again is just asking you what your thoughts are around what I'm presenting and if you have any other resources, comments or ideas around it so that we can build learning together. And again, if you can tweet me, next we have podcasts and vodcasts nowadays webinars. So you have your podcast that you basically listen to because they're audio files, you have your vodcast which are video broadcasts and those are equivalent now to what we're calling webinars. Usually though with the webinar, you need to register in order to watch it. And yes, discuss it in some manner. So usually there's synchronous so that you can log on and have discussions online while the presenter is presenting but if not, they're always archived so that you can get your professional learning that way. So we have a lot of different sites that have different types of podcast, vodcasts, webinars. So EdWeb for instance has lots of different webinars that you can choose from. WestEd focuses on research around education and what they found that works. This is the government site of webinars and what they found works in education. Ted, of course any Ted talks that you have are very inspirational. Some of them are research based but nevertheless those are video podcasts or vodcasts. Center for Learning has webinars in which you can look at regarding different disciplines. EdWeek, I know that we saw that in the webzines but then they also have lots of webinars that you can learn from. The county offices, one of them I'm going to focus on now but each public school district is within a county office and most county offices have webinars around different learning that you can look at and textbook companies. Textbook companies may be a little biased but nevertheless they have lots of webinars associated with the books that they are offering to districts. So again I'm going to go into one of the county office sites. So this happens to be for the start portage area but nevertheless technology integration because that's what I do but then like I said you can always go into any county office site and they have things for English, math, science, social studies, physical education, etc. etc. But as you can see that I've accessed, excuse me, I've accessed the site that has all the archived webinars for this year. The archived webinars so it's basically just clicking on it being the webinar comes up. I suggest sometimes that when you do webinars you can learn for yourself but to share with others and to give a little accountability you may want to have a LAN party and play the webinar with your colleagues so that you can have a discussion around it together. Next up are the blogs and wikis and websites because lots of teachers or educators nowadays have websites in which you can access lots of professional development. And then so the difference between blogs and wikis are here for you because I run into that a lot with my adult students around what's the difference between blogs and wikis but nevertheless I am going to go into edgy blogger so up here with edgy blogs and edgy blogger in order to find out what edgy blogger is and some of the professional development that they offer. So edgy blogger is not the only place that you can set your blog site by all means don't think that and I'm not necessarily recommending edgy blogger over anything else like blogger or WordPress or anything like that. I'm just stating for professional development edgy blogger has some on their sites so as you can see a mistake apology a lesson on feedback right because we need to give feedback to students in order to close up the inquiry cycle how to blog with students how to celebrate certain days that are not necessarily widely celebrated in education but how we can make it educational etc etc how to embed Pinterest boards on your blog so there's lots of different videos and blogs around what to do in education and then I chose some blogs and wikis just so you can see how some teachers are using it in their classroom so again if you access my presentation then there are direct links to pages in which I thought would be helpful for you to see some of their pages and how that can be professional development for us then there are online communities so online communities that we're accustomed to are basically your social networks excuse me and I chose all the most popular social networks right now and then I decided to focus on the hashtag community so if you look at these social learning networks that they are all social networks but you can also have professional learning communities within so I didn't necessarily like needing to the google plus site so much as how to have uh how to build community within google plus how to build community within facebook how to build community within twitter most of those are done through hashtags so that's why I wanted to share that most of them are done through hashtags so when you think of hashtags you know sometimes you come up with it yourself because you're thinking this is dessert this is food this is about first grade second grade etc but this is a pretty good article um around hashtag communities how they're used on instagram and it basically applies to how it's used on twitter how it's used on facebook etc etc so hopefully that will help you to build professional learning communities and again I'd like to know how are you thinking of using this information in your classroom tomorrow and you can tweet that to me as well and finally we have social bookmarks and social bookmarking is defined here but then these are popular social bookmarking sites they work they all work the same yet differently like dgo and delicious are pretty much the same pretty much work the same excuse me symbol works pretty uniquely yet it has the same features as as pinterest and stumble upon um evernote works uniquely as a social bookmark but yet it has the same features as other things so nevertheless I've decided to show you around symbol specifically this particular site shows you 11 ways to use symbol in the classroom symbol is basically a visual site that holds links to different websites I thought that it was important um to show you how one student um presented how she's using her symbol welcome to my personal learning environment I've been practicing networked learning in my seventh grade science class I spent some time at the beginning of the year learning how to find information online and how to pull it all together on a personal page as you can see there's lots of stuff here some things like my facebook account and the blocks across the top are not for school I organized all my school work along the bottom row every morning when I come to class I visit the science agenda to see what we're doing for the day sometimes there are videos to watch for other work to do other times I decide what I need to work on next so did you see how she clicked on her website on one of the blocks within symbol and then it went to a particular website that's exactly how the social bookmarks work she's able to share those bookmarks with other students in her classroom just like you'd be able to share any of your bookmarks with other educators and other educators are able to share their bookmarks with you we find a lot of sites that we favor it a lot but why should I find sites about edtech that I love and then you have to go find them all on your own when I could share them with just a click so then they're finally they're learning series learning series are basically different places that you can go to learn in a sequential order and then possibly get certification afterwards like google certification the mie the microsoft teacher academy those certifications and finally open courseware I decided to go to google and just to search open courseware so I can show you how you can find any of these types of online professional developments but nevertheless I'm looking for open courseware um mit I just popped up first so that's the one that I'm going to but you can see how you can find learning through here because you can always go to any of the courses that they have like I'm going to go find a course by topic um I'll go for humanities I'll go for language and I'll go for ESL and then you can see the results that I get down here and I can simply click on it view the course and then all of a sudden I have learning that I can take myself through take myself and my colleagues through take myself and my students through online learning is at your fingertips so again I'd like for you to tell us how you're going to use this in your classroom tomorrow any questions comments ideas or resources that you might have for online professional learning and what your thoughts are around the research around it and how they connect so when we think of how we're bringing this all together you want to start small reach out yet limit the number of pools that you dive in initially because you will have cognitive overload organize your learning by topic or job function so I might organize oh I only want to look for things that have to do with um my english narrative essays or I only want to look at things that have to do with me as an education technologist etc etc you want to prioritize these learnings because that will help you from getting um cognitive overload you want to scan some of the materials some things you need to engage in and some things you only need to scan so that you can see if it's useful for you and your pl n can grow temporary limbs sometimes you may need to reach out on twitter and on instagram in order to find out something and sometimes you'll find oh I don't need that particular outlet anymore I can learn from web zines and social book smarts a little more you want to realize that your network is much larger than it seems so you're not just reading my blog you're reading all the blogs that I read and all the blogs of those bloggers etc etc etc so again it's exponential learning you want to invest time but don't fret that it will take up all your time and you don't need to engage in dozens of online activities to learn skill-based things instead just conduct a youtube research a youtube video search or a google blog search in order to come up with some of this information thank you for being with me on today I'm asking that you tweet how you can use this in your classroom tomorrow and you can tweet me at d underscore educator and also because we're in the k-12 online conference at k-12 online again feel free to join our personal professional learning network at our back channel and if you need to connect with me here's my information again the presentation can be found at this website I'd also appreciate if you can give me feedback on this presentation at this website I look forward to hearing from you and how you're using online professional development