September 9, 2020
I am one of the few employees in my school that works year round. My campus has been 1 to 1 for six years and we have always collected the student’s devices for the summer. I normally spend the majority of the extra days I work making sure the devices are ready for the students when they come back to school. I also attend and deliver professional development and last year I helped facilitate a Coding Camp. This summer was unique because we did not collect the devices at the end of the year. This year, the majority of my time was spent creating training videos with accompanying handouts for my district.
The Digital Learning Team in my district is building our video library for staff, students and parents. As a team, we brainstormed and came up with an initial list of 84 videos (we are still working on creating these videos) that we felt we needed to make. The purpose of these videos is to share knowledge and save time because they can be shared and viewed as many times as necessary, but only have to be created, or taught, once. We also made an accompanying handout for each video because we have some users for whom this is a better way to assimilate information.
I mention my summer work because during the process of making these videos I learned the importance of making videos and keeping the videos short. The person viewing can go review the video if they want to, there is no need to repeat myself while making the video. Our goal was to make each video less than 5 minutes.
I really enjoyed the Modeling-Based (Flipped) Professional Development at Rutgers University – Dr. Lodge McCammon video this week. It made me realize the importance of modeling flipped learning in my professional development. One thing I had not thought about was to create all of my training as videos instead of presenting live. I thought it was interesting, there was a short introduction then they played the video of what they wanted to present. I love this idea because our training time is very limited, videos could be sent to teachers before the training session so we could use our time in training clarifying and answering questions. It would also give me time to have the teachers talk about what they learned. By creating the training as videos, participants can go back and view the “training” anytime they need a refresher. It is one more way to support learning.
References
Flipped Teacher Training. (2015, April 15). Modeling-Based (Flipped) Professional Development at Rutgers University – Dr. Lodge McCammon . YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBAmcveOnIM&feature=emb_title
Sandra Negro 