Sunday, June 23, 2013

Welcome!

Welcome to the Monument 2.0 online professional development course!  
The course will run over a five week period and be focused on vetted educational tech tools.

The over-arching “big idea” of this course is gaining 21st century teaching skills that can be transferred back into the classroom and used with students.

The project was inspired by the work of the California School Library Association and their 23 Things blog (http://schoollibrarylearning2.csla.net/) .  The blog is a self-paced online course to learn about new educational technology tools. 

The 23 Things blog was inspired by the work of Stephen Abrams who wrote an article for Information Outlook titled,  “43 Tech Things to Try This Year” (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FWE/is_2_10/ai_n16133338/).   He set up a website where you could register and try out the 43 things he listed over the course of the year.

This online course was also inspired by the PowerSearch MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) offered by Google this summer.  PowerSearch is a self-paced program of 6 classes on Google Search Tips.  You complete activities and final assessments to earn your certificate at the end. 

What all of these programs do is allow teachers to learn at their own pace in an online environment and guide them through a succinct list of solid educational tools that they test out in the “sandbox” of the course and then can transfer what they did back into their own classroom.  That is what we are hoping you will gain through this course.

UNDERSTANDINGS WE HOPE YOU GAIN BY THE END OF THE COURSE:

  • ·      These web tools are a part of 21st century teaching

  • ·      That online coursework can enhance the face-to-face classroom experience

  • ·      Using technology in the classroom requires risk taking and experimentation and collaboration




1 comment:

  1. Hi Kara,

    I'm Elle from FlowReader. What a wonderful (and thorough) article about content curation and bookmarking! Thank you so much for including us, we really appreciate it.

    Have a great day!

    ReplyDelete

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