Our school has chosen to use staff meeting time for collaboration.  Staff meetings are pretty short at my school, roughly 20-30 minutes.  So, I figured, why not offer a mini-PD on a tech tool?

I approached my principal with my idea and she loved it.  She brought it up at the first faculty meeting of the month.  There seemed to be a little bit of interest, but I couldn’t tell if teachers were really interested in losing valuable collaboration time with their departments to attend a short PD on a technology tool.

I sent out an email two days prior asking teachers to RSVP so that I knew how many to expect.  Truthfully?  I thought I would get maybe five teachers who were interested.  Then the emails started rolling in.  I even had several teachers who stopped me in the lounge or hallway telling me that they were planning to come but hadn’t emailed me yet. My count was 10 teachers, which is pretty good for a staff of 25.

Wednesday morning, teachers started filing into my room starting at 7:40.  Before I knew it, I had approximately 16 teachers sitting in my room waiting to learn about My Big Campus.  I was more than pleasantly surprised, I was shocked!  I used to conduct workshops for the entire district and I would get maybe 10 teachers…from the whole district!  And here at my school of 25 teachers, a little more than half were in attendance.

What does this mean?  It means that teachers want to learn about the various technology tools that are available.  My district is behind the times in terms of technology PD.  We no longer have a technology director or even an instructional technology department.  It was eliminated over a year and a half ago.  Schools have been left to their own devices.  And because I love technology, I figured why not share that knowledge with the teachers on my campus?  I mean, even if only five teachers attended, I would have been happy to share the benefits of integrating My Big Campus into the curriculum.  But to share that with half the staff was pretty neat.

Too bad that 25 minutes went by so fast.  I wish that we had an hour.  Maybe next time. =)