For our district professional development day on January 4th, I went out on a limb and created differentiated tasks based on Wanda Terral's Amazing Google Race and Another Amazing Race.
Here is the link to my Google Folder of documents I created for our PD day: CLICK HERE
I will share some background on the why, what, and whatever else of my development of these activities.
Why:
- I wanted to create meaningful, collaborative, hands-on activities
- I wanted to create activities the teachers could potentially adapt and use with their students
- I wanted absolute choice for each teacher
- I wanted to challenge and push their understanding of Google Apps for Education
- I wanted to spark a conversation
- I wanted the teachers to explore and play
What:
- I created 4 Tasks: Google My Maps, You Tube, Google Search, Google Hyper Docs
- Each of the 4 Tasks had 3 Challenges
- Challenges 1 and 3 are the same for each of the tasks so they are group collaborations
- Challenge 2 is differentiated or individualized based on the chosen task
- I wanted to make sure that the groups had two collaborative activities and an individual activity based on the specific interest of each teacher.
- I was deliberately not providing specific instructions and/or guidance, I wanted the teachers to tinker
I am going to share the feedback I received from the teachers because it is an incredible tool for me as an instructional coach.
I love that the teachers were comfortable and honest. The feedback gave me great insight as to where some of my teachers are in the process of adopting Google Apps for Education as a teaching and learning tool.
The feedback reinforces the fact that no matter how I tried to differentiate, one person cannot deliver effective professional development to 100 TK-8 teachers. I shared the feedback with our leadership team and asked them to consider it as we develop a district-wide PD plan.
It was a blast for me to push myself to develop the activities. The PD did provide enough for many teachers to consider or find ways to use similar activities with their students. It was a great learning experience for me and many of the teachers of AUSD.
