School Leadership Taking on Tech: Connected Educators Month 2013

A key component of Powering Up your school is planning and designing engaging and responsive professional learning activities. The PowerUp WHAT WORKS Professional Development (PD) Facilitator Guide provides suggestions and ideas for moving beyond the typical and helps elevate your PD offerings. One excellent way to craft professional learning that sticks is to take advantage of the opportunities for integrating online social learning into your ongoing PD activities. Connected Educators Month (CEM) is a unique opportunity for teachers to engage with and learn from other educators around the country. With diverse offerings from webinars, to demonstrations, to online courses (MOOCs), educators have a wealth of options to enhance their practice and build their professional learning network; however, CEM is not just for teachers. For this year’s CEM, the Office of Educational Technology (U.S. Department of Education) has put together a Connected Educator Month District Toolkit to help school and district leaders turn CEM into an integrated school or district-wide learning event. The tools and suggestions contained within the Connected Educator Month District Toolkit align with Recommendation 5: Plan Professional Learning Activities in the PowerUp Technology Implementation Practice Guide. You’ll find resources and suggestions that move you beyond merely attending the events, and which instead transform you into an active participant or even a presenter. In addition, there are materials for event promotion and suggested methods for expanding your own digital presence. Taken together, these supports will meet you where you are at in the technology implementation process, and help you to advance to the next level. Let us know how you bring together these complementary tools from PowerUp What Works and Connected Educators Month to support your school’s development of technology integration and implementation! Acknowledgement: Special thanks to Michael McGarrah for helping to compile this post. 

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