A Personalized PD Pilot
Last summer at ISTE I came across an incredible poster session called "The Amazing Race to Personalized PD" put together by Kimberly Boyd, Kim Wienken, and Rachelle Wooten from Fort Bend ISD. This poster session highlighted a personalized PD model they developed and implemented in their district. As I looked at their format, I knew this was a very feasible concept that would definitely help my teachers earn their technology PD hours- and most importantly, do it in a personalized way!
I have often reflected on my professional development methodologies and for the most part have been satisfied with much of my training content and delivery, however there's always been a few things that I knew could be improved. One was offering content that would be engaging enough to intrinsically motivate teachers to apply newly learned tools or resources post-training; another was making content more interesting to them by providing more choice. And the final challenge we often faced was time!
This poster session really got me thinking! The more I looked into personalized PD, I knew it was something that I just had to try at my own campuses. First, because teachers would have choice in what they learned and secondly, they would also be able to choose how they would receive the content! And finally, by using something similar to the Amazing Race model, it was something that could be done when the teachers had some time, not necessarily during a planning period, or even requiring them to stick around after school.
Preparing The Pilot
After getting the go-ahead to pilot this at my schools, I started to develop 5 HyperDocs that I would use to deliver the content. The training choices were Using Twitter to Grow Your PLN, Quizizz, Flipgird, YouTube and Padlet. I began to develop my HyperDocs based on a sample template, "Let's Explore the United States", created by Kelly Hilton and Sarah Landis.
At first, I worked on each of the HyperDocs for several hours each, making sure to include only the best stuff I had collected over time. I was also cognizant of adding a variety of resources to ensure that I was addressing all the various learning styles. I continued tweaking and improving the HyperDocs over the following days. Then something else happened. I stumbled across a podcast that perfectly complemented what I was working on. The podcast, Are You a Curator or a Dumper?, by another person of inspiration, Jennifer Gonzalez, just happened to cross my path at the perfect time!
In her podcast, Gonzalez shares a lot of great ideas focused on how we present information. I was all ears because it was exactly what I was trying to accomplish. One of her suggestions is to use images to anchor content. She also recommended a few curation tools, one of which was elink.io. Although I didn't re-create my HyperDocs through this resources because of time constraints, I definitely used it as a guide when improving the look of my original HyperDocs. For anyone looking into creating a HyperDoc, I'd highly recommend the HyperDoc Templates resource, as well as elink.io.
Launching The Pilot
Ok, so I launched the pilot, explained to teachers how it would work, and they were off! Teachers were reassured that although this model was meant for them to work on their PD hours at their own convenience, I would still be available for support, guidance and 1-1 training, should they need it.
About 70% of my participants worked on the HyperDocs independently, successfully completing the tasks. The remaining 30% requested some guidance as they worked their way through. An added benefit that I experienced was that when I was assisting them, I could now ask "What would you like to learn today?", being that they now had 5 different options to choose from! I had never been able to do that before! Note, for those that requested support, I noticed that perhaps they did not search through every single link in the HyperDocs since I was there to verbalize the content. But as I touched on certain topics, they were able to see what was there, and knew they could go back to reference at a later time.
The HyperDocs were housed in our OneNote Staff Notebook. Since this notebook is accessed frequently to submit lesson plans, I thought it would be a good idea to create a Technology Trainings tab, and place them there for easy access.
The Outcome
After the Personalized PD training was complete, I asked those who participated to fill out a survey, anonymously, to give me feedback on what they liked, and didn't like about the new model. Overall 96% of our feedback was positive; in fact, teachers even said they would like to use something like this over the summer, or as the new school year approaches! Right away, I thought some great ideas for content would be ClassDojo, Remind, Seesaw and other apps that come in handy as teachers start getting ready for the new school year!
The other 4% of those surveyed, also provided helpful feedback. The only problem some had was they had never seen a HyperDoc before, and therefore felt they needed to understand more about how they work, before going in on their own. In thinking ahead, I could spend more time going over this aspect of the delivery format next time.
After The Pilot
At this point my department and I will evaluate the pilot and decide if this is something we may want to offer as a option for more teachers. Personally, I love the idea of choice, and based on their feedback, the teachers did as well! It would also be great to offer something like this over the summer, thereby allowing teachers who are already getting ahead, to earn some Technology PD hours at the same time!
As you can see, I gained inspiration from so many people! The pilot blended ideas from several sources: the task ideas for PD credit from Fort Bend ISD, the HyperDocs idea from The HyperDoc Girls, and curating and polishing ideas from Jennifer Gonzalez's amazing podcasts!
If you'd like to check out the HyperDocs I created for this pilot, which will always be a work in progress, you can find them in my Presentations page.
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