Thursday, July 7, 2011

How will i design a professional development workshop

As a future leader to facilitate a professional development workshop, I will be in a position to let the power of technology be known to general teachers I think I will keep in mind several aspects in leading the workshop.
First, there are many teachers who are resistant to the use of technology. At the same time, they are struggling to keep students’ attention in the classroom and are attributing it to students’ short attention spans. However, the real problem may originate from the fact that the traditional educational environment can no longer keep today’s students motivated. They need to understand what is wrong with their current traditional lecture method and what is good with the incorporation of technology into their teaching practices. They also need to recognize that today’s students are totally different from the older generation in their learning style. Therefore, traditional teachers need to realize the power of technology in helping students learn better and encourage them to be independent learners in the workshop.
Second, every teacher has his/her expertise in his/her teaching practice whether they are traditional teachers or innovative teachers. Therefore, I may do collaborative work in preparing workshop materials. Collaborative work is a good method to show how useful technology is in order to work together and come up with better materials or ideas; sharing and editing documents in Google Doc when making handouts and other products. Another characteristic of a group of teachers is that teachers are very opinionated about a certain topics.
With these in mind, I think I can achieve my goal of the instruction by designing the workshop and teaching materials as follows.
First, I will use web-based resources such as YouTube videos or websites to show the capabilities of web 2.0 technologies. This will help traditional teachers understand that digital natives prefer to create and share their products over reading books.
Second, I may invite student guest speakers who used to be bored by passive learning, but are transformed to be active learners with the use of technologies and multi-media in the classroom. This will help technology-resistant teachers realize the power of technology.
Third, I will arrange time where teachers can share the pros and cons of both technology-enhanced education and traditional education. I will split the group into small groups and the small group members will be mixed with technology-expert teachers and technology-resistant teachers.
Fourth, I will make my instructional delivery interactive by having the audience send cell phone text messages to a website such as polleverywhere.com where the audience send their text messages and get immediate responses or statistics.

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