A reasonable professional development strategy is one that begins with a CRAWL – a task that provides easy entry into the topic or concept being taught. Participants should very quickly reap the benefits of some early successes. This follows how well designed video games work – it is easy to enter the game and players achieve some simple and early successes.

The second phase – WALK – is one in which expectations are raised and participants challenge themselves to master more complex concepts and skills. They begin to make connections more quickly between the skills they are learning and the educational outcomes made possible by applying these skills to teaching and learning. In the video game analogy, they have mastered many of the game moves and have progressed up a couple of levels. They are moving through the virtual world more quickly and are feeling more comfortable navigating the game landscape.

The third phase – RUN – is marked by participants taking what they have learned and running with it. They have the confidence to adapt their new skills to meet their style and goals, and further, to begin to innovate both in their use of technology as well as in their actual lessons and assignments. If this were a video game, they would be getting closer to saving the Princess and would be munching stars and power boosters and easily defeating the power draining obstacles the game puts in their path. They would have learned more moves and could switch between the basic game moves and the trickier ones at will.

The professional development area I want to focus on with educators in my school district this year is online communication and collaboration. My vision includes teachers and administrators confidently using listserves, blogs, wikis, and “cloud” document sharing to teach, learn, communicate, and collaborate.

What I am struggling with is applying the CRAWL – WALK – RUN strategy to this effort and envisioning the CRAWL stage. What can we expect in CRAWL? Is it simply reading blogs and commenting? If so, what are those early successes? What impels people forward to WALK?

In the WALK phase, administrators might replace current newsletters and announcements previously done on paper and on web pages with a blog. The wins are easy to foresee – instant communication with many, a sense of personal accomplishment, and positive community feedback. One of many possible “win” scenarios for educators would be participating with students in an online environment (Moodle or a wiki or a blog) and the early successes, again, are easy to imagine.

As I plan professional development activities for the coming year, it would be so helpful to hear from other educators. I welcome advice on how to frame that CRAWL or introductory phase. I especially am interested in hearing from voices of experience. If you have accomplished this in your district how did you begin and what were the intrinsic rewards for those early adopters?

It has been a week since NECC finished and I have been reflecting on whether the conference met my expectations and on what I found to be most valuable.

In some ways NECC met my expectations, while in other ways it did not.

The most important part of the conference to me was the people, the conversations, the personal contacts, and the connections. We hear often that teaching is an isolating profession. I agree, but in fact, there are hundreds of teachers in my school district and they have each other. They may choose to stay isolated but can also decide to support each other, collaborate, commiserate, and share the bond born of a common profession, working for the same employer. I, however, am the only Technology Director in my district. While I enjoy the company (and insights and collegiality) of the teachers and administrators with whom I work, I also really appreciate my local job-alike meetings and collaborating with those peers and serving on committees and boards. Not only do I find it personally rewarding and professionally invigorating, but I also place a high value on the relationships that are built around these activities and commitments.

NECC provides an even bigger forum for those connections. I met people whose work I have read and followed for quite a while and bloggers whose writing fills my google reader pages on a regular basis. I renewed acquaintances I made at previous conferences and I touched base with many other ISTE affiliate leaders. There were many exhibitors I needed to talk to, and I managed to get to them all (in one big room!) and I also got to enjoy some social time with several of the corporate attendees. I took advantage of opportunities to get to know new friends (from as far away as Australia) and to share ideas with educators from all over the states. Ironically enough, some of the best conversations were with folks from my own state and from around New England – people who I get to see fairly often, but usually within a tight timeframe with a packed agenda. Tending to this network of colleagues is like taking care of the garden – the rewards are reaped far into the future, as these connections form my personal learning network.

One way that NECC09 did not quite meet my expectations is that I was hoping to gather ideas to help me be a more disruptive educational leader in my district. I am still trying to develop ways to challenge the status quo more directly, with minimum tears and as gently as I can. I think it is a fine line I have to walk as a member of the administration who harbors, in my darkest recesses, the heart of a renegade, a rabble-rouser. If I am actively involved in driving technology use, then I am a change agent (like so many of you) and this may be more than a little scary to many people.

I attended two sessions that I had hoped would inspire me with ideas to support this goal. They were:
How 2 B a Disruptive Technology Leader!
and
Effective Leadership in an Era of Disruptive Innovation

Both sessions were good, but not on target for what I was looking for. I think that I must have read more into the titles and descriptions than what was there, only because of my existing agenda. Anyway, my goal for the next school year is to take on the challenge of being disruptive in a constructive and positive way. If any of you have suggestions of blogs or books I should read, classes I should take, or armor I should purchase, please let me know. I can use some help and would love to have company on this mission – if you are planning something similar, maybe you could share your own posts on the topic.

A s Director of Technology for a K-12 school district, there are times when a specific project or topic usurps a majority of my time and attention. For example, there may be a network upgrade project that commands my attention, or at other times it could be strategic planning or grant writing or goal setting or team building or curriculum planning and development (this list could go on and on) that needs my focus and pushes itself to the top of my list for an extended period of time. Lately, my recurring preoccupation has been all about professional development (PD).

I’ve been reading and writing about PD, writing grants focused on PD programs, and working with colleagues planning PD conferences (MassCUE and METAA Technology Leadership Symposium and the Fall MassCUE and M.A.S.S. Technology Conference ). In both monthly technology department meetings and in our district administrative meetings, I started a practice of having some technology PD as part of every meeting. We have held to this more closely in department meetings, but did indeed include PD using technology in some of our district administrative meetings. Lastly, the most recent issue of on Cue , the professional journal of MassCUE for which I am the managing editor, is a themed issue with a focus on PD. Phew! So much to learn, so little time.

One of the grants is to create opportunities for teachers to participate in PD so that they will become purveyors of PD to their colleagues (train the trainer, is the popular terminology). The other grant is for online courses for teachers to become proficient in online teaching. The conferences will include keynote speakers, presentation-style sessions, a cyber café, hands-on workshops, and “make it and take it” sessions (learn on a new device and take the device with you at the end of the session).

If you are a MassCUE member, you recently received (or are about to receive) your Spring 2009 on Cue issue. This issue, delivered to the post office in April, started ten to twelve months ago. The theme was developed and publicized during the spring and summer last year. Starting with the March 2008 Technology Leadership Symposium and the fall conference I connected with presenters, educators, bloggers, and authors and invited them to contribute articles about PD. The work continued through the winter, soliciting articles from around the country, reading, editing, and planning out the issue. By the time on Cue finally went to press I felt like I had been engulfed in PD forever. Not such a bad thing, since I am a “true believer.” I think professional development and personal growth are the most important factors to improving the state of education. So, in your on Cue issue, authors share perspectives, disclose personal stories of growth and learning, and offer concrete suggestions. Thank you to all of the contributors:
Justin Reich (co-author Best Ideas for Teaching with Technology )
Thomas Daccord (co-author Best Ideas for Teaching with Technology )
Miguel Guhlin (blog: Around the Corner – MGuhlin.org )
Peggy Harvey
Walter McKenzie (site: SurfAquarium )
Carol Holzberg (profile )
Romeo Marquis (The Learning Curve )
Julie Koven (at Gann Academy )
Jason Schneider (in the news )

I hope that each reader of  on Cue is inspired to take steps toward building his/her own personal learning network and commits to sharing his/her journey with others.

W hat should I be reading to stay informed, gather information from a wider variety of sources, and broaden my personal learning network beyond the edublogger community? This is a question that I drew from a recent post, De-Echoing My Reading Practice…Help Wanted , by Will Richardson.

"Still in the progress of rethinking my online reading habits…I’ve also been looking at different avenues to find the most interesting, most relevant stuff, and, most importantly, to shift my reading to include more diversity."    ~  http://weblogg-ed.com/category/connective-reading/

I have a couple of suggestions and they are both news digests of sorts. The first is the Marshall Memo , A Weekly Round-up of Important Ideas and Research in K-12 Education , compiled and distributed by Kim Marshall , former teacher, central office curriculum director, and Boston principal. This is an excellent digest and well worth the subscription fee. Kim reads 44 professional, mainstay journals (see list ) and pulls from other sources, as well. He chooses several articles every week to synopsize. His criteria for inclusion are thoughtful and vary from reviewing an old idea in a new light to practical information with real examples. On his web site you can read a more thorough explanation of how he chooses articles for inclusion.

I subscribe to the Marshall Memo because for a very small fee, I receive the services of a professional, designated reader, a well-respected educator with many years of experience in K-12 education. There is no way I have the time to read as many journals as Kim Marshall reads for me, and the journals cover a wide variety of topics and themes from policy to curriculum to professional development. This service really helps me to diversify my reading, in terms of topics, authors, and viewpoints. I find that reading “mainstream” professional education journals keeps me more in touch with what my less web-connected colleagues are thinking is important and broadens my own perspective. This service helps me select which articles to read in full, but also gives me a useful summary for those articles I don’t follow up on to read the full version.

The second news digest service that I endorse is the Public Education Network (PEN) Newsblast . Although, if you are going to subscribe to only one, my recommendation is the Marshall Memo. PEN Weekly Newsblast "is a free electronic newsletter featuring resources and information about public school reform, school finance, and related issues." To subscribe to the Newsblast, visit the main web page where there is a link to their RSS feed. This is also a good way to stay informed about mainstream topics in education, but I find that the vetting of articles included in the Marshall Memo fits my needs better.

Last, this is probably much too obvious for most readers of Will’s blog, but I also suggest subscribing to education topics through RSS feeds for the New York Times and NPR, for some of the same reasons to subscribe to the news digests mentioned above. I think that one difference between the digests and NYT and NPR is the intended audience. NYT and NPR are writing for the general reading public, while the digests are targeting readers from the education profession.

I read edublogs and visit wikis and am developing an online presence because these activities connect me to knowledgeable colleagues and allow me to create a strong personal learning network. The ideas and resources I encounter move me toward being a better Technology Director, and a better professional developer. The articles I read from PEN and the Marshall Memo help me connect my online learning to more topics of concern to educators. It is these connections that help me make progress in my own district. I advise Instructional Technology Specialists to really listen at school and to hone in to what the core curriculum concerns are in their building so that they can help teachers apply technology to those issues. For me, I try to apply the same principle on a broader scale, and these digests are a couple of the tools I use to gather information about these core concerns.