Monday, October 8, 2007

October = Professional Development Without Borders

by Michael Richards

This is a great month for teaching and technology
in terms of professional development. There are two big events coming up, the K12 Online Conference and ACTEM's MAINEd Conference. Each of these events offer educators and administrators a lot to think about when it comes to teaching with technology.

Today kicked off the
K12 Online Conference with David Warlick's keynote address "Inventing the New Boundaries" and tomorrow will be a follow up to the keynote with a fireside chat. Over the next few weeks the conference will have sessions for a wide range of educators as well as a wide range of ability levels. Last year's conference was very well received and this year's is already setting the bar even higher. The great part of this conference is the fact that it is free and the sessions can be viewed at anytime from anywhere you have an Internet connection. Check out the teasers for sessions to find something you may want to check out later. The complete schedule with blogging tags can be found here.

At the end of the week ACTEM is sponsoring their 20th annual MAINEd Conference. Everything kicks off Thursday afternoon with pre-conference sessions. Will Richardson and Vicki Davis are each running a session (New Web Technologies Transforming Education and Wikis in Curriculum respectively) as well as other sessions from some great people. The next day there are some great sessions following Will Richardson's keynote address that address the needs of educators and administrators from Maine. If you're not able to make the conference people will be blogging and podcasting sessions so you can always attend virtually. If you're attending and plan on sharing your experiences please use technorati tags ACTEM MAINEd07 in your posts to help people track conversations through hitchikr. I've developed session tags based off the conference sessions that can be accessed here.

The only excuse one might have for not getting involved would be time. Even that excuse is negated by the fact you can follow these sessions through RSS feeds. This allows the user to have a professional development on demand experience, a very powerful 21st Century opportunity. You just need to take the first step and enjoy the ride.



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