“There can be that mindset, especially when teachers are overwhelmed, that this is just another PD that I'm not really going to be able to use. So, I feel like the power of PD lies in collaboration. We’ve got to make it worth their time. Look at what they’re already doing and look at how they can strengthen it, making sure that that time to curate and create is in collaboration with their PLC or their department, depending on the building. That’s super, super important and it allows them to build a digital community among themselves.
“They are able feed off one another and it doesn't all fall on their shoulders. They’re working with each other. That’s the type of teacher training that they get a lot out of. It also has to be ongoing. I don’t think it can be that one-and-done thing. The platforms are always changing. A lot of times they are getting better. They’re improving as student needs are changing. There needs to be that constant touching base and that ongoing professional development understanding, making sure that the teachers in your district understand that they’re not on an island. They should feel supported and know who to go to for that daily support.”
– Kristin Dages, Media Technology Coordinator, Hudson City School District
“Time is what changed, and it wasn’t in proportion to how it changed for teachers. Teachers of course were overwhelmed and didn't have enough time. And what we found is sometimes, our time had to shift. So it might've been when we inserted or it might’ve been for how long we inserted. And so, my two big ideas, out of pandemic, is we have to get closer to on-demand for a lot of our training and our Professional Learning and we might not reach there in every item. We don’t have every item on-demand, but how quickly can I get that to people? And then micro-learning as a big idea has been with me for a while, but can I tell you that I've really identified just content micro-learning and now I’ve shifted to, a micro audience nowadays. When I’m in a district of about 3000 teachers, if I get an afterschool session of 14 teachers, that's a good session. That would not have been true in 2019 or 2018 or 2017. I have to become okay with reaching out to a micro audience, with micro-content, maybe repeatedly.”
– Dr. Penny Christensen, eLearning Specialist, Hall County Schools
“We were actually struggling with teacher training and technology in the classroom and ample professional development opportunity before COVID happened and then COVID happened, and everything just went insane. So many of the things that both Kristen and Penny brought up were existing problems that were exacerbated by the need to go completely digital, or in many cases, completely digital where educators were just unprepared for that. If you think back 15 years, an educator had a textbook, maybe they had a CD-Rom that accompanied it, that they might use for activities. And they were good to go. They were off to the races. As K-12 has evolved, and textbooks were slowly becoming less and less used in favor for more adaptable technology, customizable content to level for students to support differentiated learning, et cetera, the training for that and the adoption of that was not consistent. And so then: enter COVID, and these educators got to learn Zoom or Google Meet or both. They got to be more involved in their learning management system. They have to learn about how to search for their own content, where they can customize it, how they can merge the pieces together.”
– Lemma Shomali, Director K-12 Products, Gale
