Johnson County Schools ProLearn
Effective Professional Development (PD) is a must for continuous growth of educators and students. High quality trainings keep educators current on instructional trends, technology, and cutting edge educational practices. Professional Development Coordinators are tasked with providing personalized high quality trainings that increase educator effectiveness and student results.
These trainings should develop skillful leaders that build capacity. The impact of the development should be monitored, evaluated, provide useful constructive feedback, aligned to educator development, meet performance standards, aligned to curriculum standards, apply learning theories/research/models, and be sustainable. This is not an easy task to accomplishment even on a robust budget. Compounding the complexity of implementing high quality professional development, Kentucky is set to take a 50% reduction to the PD budget during the 2017-2018 school year. Districts are scrambling to come up with viable solutions.
What if we could create a free sustainable professional development web portal that is unique to each district's professional learning needs? What if this structure was carefully vetted by district, regional, and content area experts to ensure high quality professional development opportunities? Might we change the structure of PD in our districts?
Johnson County ProLearn Web Portal is being developed to meet the unique needs of Johnson County students and educators. Educators can use a Google Form to submit courses they would like to be developed. Currently, they can browse from a library of nine courses with several more being developed. Once an educator selects a course they use a course code to join a Google Classroom. Educators work through numerous topics with tasks to complete at the end of each. Participants develop course goals. Then work to complete self-paced activities ranging from reflecting on videos, articles, books, professional blogs, and designing/implementing a lesson plan based on their learning. Educators may video the lesson and upload to Google Classroom. Alternatively, they may video themselves and students reflecting on the lesson. The playlist is hosted on the web portal so future participants and interested stakeholders can reference. A Google Plus Community has been created for each course so educators can collaborate by sharing ideas and promote ongoing learning once the course is completed. Additionally, this group will serve as mentors for new participants completing the course. Digital badges will be awarded after successful completion of all components of the course. Courses are monitored by the Instructional Supervisor, Professional Development Coordinator, Innovation Coordinator, and Technology Integration Specialist. Courses are being vetted by district and regional experts. Participants and administrators showcase digital badges on social media.
One way in which JCS ProLearn is promoting new technology and media enrichment into the the classrooms of teachers is with courses on Google Drawings, Youtube, Prezi Next, Blogger, Glogster EDU, Edmodo, and Screencast-O-Matic.
KVEC Trans Media Fellow lead Dr. Bruce Parsons will be collaborating with Johnson County students and educators through an online FIREshare Video Production Course. Dr. Parson kicked off the course with a site visit to introduce himself and the course to students and educators. Students learned first-hand tips and tricks to video production. He also demonstrated how to use Padcaster (mobile media system). Students will be using the Padcaster as part of the course and innovation grant. (Padcaster was purchased with funding from ARI Innovation Grant.) You can keep updated on this project by visiting FIREshare and Promising Practices Hollers.