My 25% PD

After reflecting on the amount of PD teachers should be receiving, I've decided that I have to control my own PD. I have been for most of this year. But it hit me today as I had a light class load that I am in charge of my own PD and so I did what you do at any good PD opportunity. I poured myself a big cup of coffee (Starbuck's Coffee and used my French press, the only way to have coffee I've decided) and started on my PD for the day. Where did I start you ask? Simple, in my bloglines account.

This has been the best day of PD I could ever hope for. I was in control of my learning. I was able to click on links that were interesting and ignore the information that I felt didn't apply to me. I read, commented, reflected, bookmarked, and just felt the excitement inside me grow as I found some great stuff. So I've decided to make it my goal to spend 25% of my time doing my own PD. That adds up to 525 minutes of PD a week or 8.75 hours of PD a week or 1.75 hours of PD a day.

Today being a slow day in the lab I spent roughly 4 hours of PD time today.

So in my first Weekly PD post here is what I found today that inspired me:

http://www.theircircularlife.it/
Their Circular Life, an exploration about human behavior

http://mrmayo.typepad.com/magazine/
Brandon's Online Magazine: A magazine that is a blog created and maintained by a class of 6th graders.

http://www-ed.fnal.gov/projects/scientists/index1.html
Who's the Scientist: Seventh graders describe scientists before and after a visit to Fermilab.

200602015
From the Shifted Librarian a look at Google and libraries in 2015.

http://www.techsavvyed.net/forum/index.php
The Techsavvyed forum of educators finding great sites on the web.

http://www.wikispaces.com/
Heard about this place but actually went there today and looked around. Wheels are spinning of how to use this.

http://www.loticonnection.com/
My admin wants to do a survey of technology use in our school. So if you are going to collect information you might as well do it right. The LOTI survey is still a great tool at looking at technology implementation within a school.

http://www.connectivism.ca/blog/53
Rethinking Learning: George Siemens makes available his presentation. This was a well spend hour of my time today. Can't wait to share this with others.

http://tenbyten.org/10x10.html
I was here once a while back, but forgot about it. What a cool site!

http://www.thethinkingstick.com/?p=96
Revisited my own thoughts on PD in schools and what we should be doing vs what we are doing.

http://www.food-force.com/
Can't wait to get my 5th graders playing this, hopefully in March.

http://www.mathmastery.com/cyberchallenge/
What a fun way to practice math facts

http://www.usd298.com/math/games.html
A list of math games on the web for all ages

http://nlvm.usu.edu/en/nav/vlibrary.html
National Library of Virtual Manipulatives

http://eduplace.com/tales/
What a great way to practice parts of speech

All this and going through my bloglines account. I'm sorry, you just can't beat this type of learning. I caught myself a couple times today just thinking about what I was doing, clicking here, going there, coming back to this page, reading that, linking to this. What a wonderful world of information!

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