PD for Social Studies.

One of the biggest challenges I have faced as a CFF coach has been a general lack of time for professional development.

Last Friday I was able to act somewhat proactively and find time with some of my teachers.

There was a scheduled in-service day on Friday. The, because of a quirk in the schedule, it was closely followed by a second in-service day the following Tuesday. I heard through the grape vine that because of this, the first day had a large amount of time allotted to department meetings. My school does not have regular department meetings, so I rarely have the opportunity to speak to a large group at once.

Taking some initiative, I sent out an email to all of the department chairs, offering to give some professional development--on any topic or program, for any length of time. I figured that being flexible would make the offer more attractive. If a department head only had fifteen minutes to fill, and was afraid I was asking for an hour, it would have been a missed chance.

I heard back from both the Math and the Social Studies departments. Math later had to cancel because they had to focus more on curriculum, and, as the department chair told me, they had a rare, engaging, and productive dialogue going on.

Social Studies offered me a two hour block in which to present whatever I wanted.

I had to sit down and give this some thought. I wanted to present something useful, and something fun that would grab their attention and help them see me as someone who can help enliven the classroom and not just someone who drone on and on about technical issues. I decided to go with Photo Story and xtranormal, and to end with a demonstration of the new ActiveInspire software that we are hopefully adding to the computer images over the summer.

Photo Story did not go well. I had originally anticipated having about a half dozen high school teachers with teacher CFF laptops. I knew that about half had Photo Story and about half did not. That was a decent mix, because I was planning on having teachers work in pairs to create a short story. I gathered pictures for me to use to make a presentation while demonstrating, and another set of pictures for them to use to make their own. That way, I we could save time but not having teachers have to search for pictures. Unfortunately, my plans were for nought. When i arrived, there were about a dozen teachers, from the middle school and the high school, and two of the teacher with Photo Story were not able to attend. So, almost everyone needed to use a student laptop, but those had been recently re-imaged and no longer had Photo Story. I did a very quick presentation, that even I knew was getting dull and boring, because no one could follow along. All they could do was watch. I kept it to about ten minutes, and showed just the very basic buttons. I also showed parts of two student generated Photo Stories as examples of what students can create in a limited time. The examples were by far the best part of the presentation, and I was glad I had thought to bring them.

I very quickly moved on to xtranormal. This was a program I chose because I knew most of the computers had updated flash, so most of the computers could run the program. Also, I know that it is always a big hit. It is fun, easy to use, and most educators can envision ways for either themselves or their students to use it in the classroom. About half the computers did not have the latest flash, so mostly everyone worked with a partner, but even that went well.

I started by showing a demo video I had made. In it, a British Ninja and an Australian judge discuss how easy xtranormal is to use. I then pointing everyone to the website and had them sign up. I then walked them through selecting characters, voices, and a setting. As a group, we came up with a few lines of dialogue. I demonstrated switching between characters, adding camera angles, and adding actions. As I was doing this, everyone was able to follow along and add their own actions, angles, and lines.

When I finished the short demo, I gave an assignment. Each group had to create a movie with at least six lines, two actions, two camera angles, and, for "extra credit" two looks at the cameras, two facial expressions, and one point.

It went well. Everyone completed a movie. I don't know if everyone met every requirement, though. I really only used those as guides to encourage exploration and creativity.

And most importantly, they had fun doing it. Everyone was laughing, and sharing their movies as they worked. And they were talking about making movies for their classes, or having students do them. All in all it was a great success.

I then demonstrated tinyurl as a way to easily get a link to everyone's finished video to share with the group.

In the end, we didn't have time for the ActiveInspire demo. But I think that this was time well spent. Several teachers were exposed to a tool they didn't know they had. Several were inspired to see how easy some technology is. And, I hope, a few saw the value of working with me to show them these tools so they can use them to reach their classroom goals.