Well, I was swept away by the holidays, a trip to New York, and budget matters before that, many budget matters.... so haven't posted for a while. Just catching up on my blog feeds, and I want to post again about the Adult Education Matters blog by Martha Rankin and her staff at Newport Mesa USD Adult School. The blog is a part of their overall professional development plan, and they use it to keep staff updated on work of various teams, to post documents such as their school-wide PD plan, and ESLRs (expected student learning results). They even have a short PowerPoint about their ESLRs that students view and then sign via SmartBoard.
This blog is such a good example of how blogging can be used by an administrator and program to build a sense of community and share information, I wish every adult ed program in California could check it out. The goals of the blog are:
- to provide current research and articles on the matters of adult education
- to give useful and successful ways to put the research into practice in the fields
- to create an online “home” for professional development ideas in the form of videos, music, pictures, documents, and online articles
- to build a learning community among adult educators and provide an e-forum in which they can collaborate
Technology integration is an important part of their school-wide professional development plan, and is reflected in each of its four sections. For example, they support peer tech mentors to offer tech tips during a 20 minute period at the beginning of class when students have independent work to do. Topics include using SmartBoards, blogging, Internet sites, writing projects, etc. There is a big emphasis on collaboration, and on the importance of technology as a part of 21st century literacy. What a great model!
2 comments:
Marian, I wanted to thank YOU for leading me to OTAN's Technology Integration Videos in the video gallery of OTAN's website. I have referred to them as my "Top Picks" for video tutorials on technology integration in my "Video Tutorials for the Virtual Learning Community" article. I also emailed them out to all of my adult ed teachers. One of the "virtual meeting" assignments for my 8 technology peer mentors was to view the tutorials on SmartBoards from awesome Catherine McNally of Eureka Adult School. They really appreciated the tips and are using them in their small-group, Tech Tip Tuesday, and one-on-one trainings on SmartBoards. Thanks so much.
Thanks, Martha, I'm so glad you're using our videos!! Catherine had some great examples for SmartBoards, and electronic whiteboards are really taking off now, so I'm glad we chose that as a topic. If you have other suggestions for topics of videos on technology integration let me know. You're doing such a great job with your blog and your professional learning community!
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