Summercore Professional Development Experience Reflections

We just wrapped up an intense week of professional development on all things relating to educational technology. See my previous post to view a Michael Wesch inspired video that we created at the end of the week. All-in-all, I thought it really was an excellent experience with a total of 26 faculty members going through Summercore together. Below are a few questions and reflections I have

1. How can we share out our work from this week? We can do this virtually by making our Moodle site public and I think we could possibly do some sharing at a faculty meeting in August/September when we get back to school. What else can we do??

2. How can we make learning experiences like this a more regular part of our culture? While this was a fantastic week, it was only a single week. Can we make this type of learning a regular part of what we do without it becoming another add-on?

3. The cross pollination between teachers of different departments and divisions was immensely valuable. How can we extend the non-traditional groupings of faculty throughout the school year? Perhaps faculty could self form groups based upon professional learning interests.

4. Everyone was a teacher and a learner over the course of the week. Many thanks to Heather, Bear, Sarah and Doris for serving as faculty assistant instructors. The model of teachers teaching teachers is a good one and quite worthy of expanding.

5. The morning discussions where each person shared their thoughts on the previous evening's readings were fantastic. I only wish that some of these discussions took place virtually in moodle forums so that our faculty members would've had this experience as well.

6. I think the 8:30-5:30 days were about an hour or two too long. I think the days could've been shortened up to allow for more asynchronous reflection work in forums/blogs.

7. Did we focus too much on the tools in not enough on the concepts? For example, should it be, "iMovie and Voicethread," or rather, "Conveying a message through a mixed media narrative?"

A special thanks to Steve Bergen and Lynne Schalman of Summercore. This was our second year of working with them and they really have helped us progress in our thinking about the role of digital technology in learning. The "Olive Tree and the Lexus" metaphor is one that we'll all be grappling with as we move forward.