Are you drained from all the grading, planning and day-to-day responsibilities of being a successful educator? We all know that educators are mentally tested every day in their classrooms on curriculum, content knowledge, pedagogy, behavior management and maybe even your patience levels, sucking the life out of our batteries. With all of the daily responsibilities, Professional Development seems to be another energy vampire. Let’s get recharged with realistic, quality Professional Development that will add to our craft of teaching while providing useful learning opportunities while using 21st century skills.
As educators, we know that need to recharge our pedagogy batteries with useful, new and relevant information in order to best help our students, but who has the time? Increasing the productivity of Professional Development would immensely help teachers to save time and be able to share ideas and reflect upon their own learning. For example, a study was conducted on using Twitter as a social media outlet to connect teachers, share ideas, and reflect on their own usage of learning and it increased participation in Professional Development by 94% (Ross, Maninger, Laprairie, & Sullivan, 2015). In addition, online blogs (go figure) can be great tools to encourage reflection and increase deeper knowledge of understanding in teachers’ own pedagogies (Raffo, 2012). Both of these examples allow for differentiated learning and instruction. Using active digital learning can lead to a personal interaction of ideas when incorporating Professional Development.
So why are we not using it to our advantage? In today’s education system, digital learning is a component that is ever changing and difficult to perpetually transform with. However, active digital learning provides a faster and more productive way to learn new information and would be a beneficial tool in Professional Development. Leaders in education would be able to promote cooperative learning, sharing new information and implementing strategies to increase their productivity and knowledge.
The focus of my dissertation will be to illustrate the growing demands of active digital learning in Professional Development. As the needs of our students grows with the expansion of technology, educators must be learning at a faster and more productive rate to provide relevant and beneficial educational tools. Through the use of active digital learning in Professional Development, leaders in education will be able to cooperatively learn, implement and share ideas, strategies, and tools.
Educational leaders are accountable for guiding and implementing active digital learning through their quality Professional Development. With an ever-changing technological society, educational leaders should be at the forefront of using technology to develop future leaders and implementing current practices. Professional Development should be conducted in a manner that knowledge can be shared from one professional to another with the ability to continue to distribute with colleagues and others invested in education.
As we continue to build and adapt our craft of teaching, we need to plug ourselves into the active digital learning age, starting with Professional Development. Implementing new technologies into our own learning skill set is not only going to increase our pedagogy but develop skills that will increase our adaptability in the classroom and increase our productivity.
How could you incorporate active digital learning, into your already busy schedule, to increase your pedagogy and decrease your workload?
References
Raffo, D. (2012). Blogging as a reflective tool for leadership development: An exploratory study of a leadership practicum grounded in the relational leadership model. Delta Pi Epsilon Journal, LIV(2), 39-51.
Ross, C., Maninger, R., Laprairie, K., & Sullivan, S. (2015). The Use of Twitter in the Creation of Educational Professional Learning Opportunities. Administrative Issues Journal Education Practice and Research AIJ, 5(1), 55-76. doi:10.5929/2915.5.1.7