My keynote podcast for the K12 Conference goes online today (it's here now), and the discussion from Saturday's fireside chat runs really well alongside it (just save the app when your asked to view the whole session's video, whiteboards, audio and chat).
This is an outline of the kind of things I've discussed in the keynote and the questions I would love to know the answers to.
For the past year I have been responsible for the development of an online professional development project for Modern Foreign Languages teachers. The MFLE was a pilot for how things might me delivered through Glow, the national intranet. When I inherited the project the spec written back in the early part of the century was concentrated more on the online world as a discussion forum and resource repository than on a collaborative space where teachers can share, construct their beliefs and knowledge and try out new ways of teaching and learning.
After a year of promoting the use of social media for professional development we now have a burgeoning community of modern linguists and other teaching professionals connecting to each other and sharing their ideas, thoughts, complaints and congrats through complex social networks. My current role as New Technologies Research Practitioner with Learning and Teaching Scotland aims to explore these avenues further.
The difference is substantial between the 'traditional' means of professional development, which inspired the MFLE, and the 'connected' means of professional development, which the project has, to some extent, helped begin to bring to the mainstream.
Why? Read on in the extended post...
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