A Great Day of Professional Development

Originally Posted May 1st, 2009 by mrfrerichs


We just finished a day of professional development at Okoboji Community Schools and I am very satisfied with what went on today. I started the day at the elementary building doing some data analysis work. My main purpose for being there was to introduce the teachers to an on-line database we can utilize and to assist them in using Calc as a tool to work with the data. I had already created several templates for the teachers to utilize, but as the conversations happened today, improvements and addition to the existing templates were discovered as well as completely new templates that are needed. My ultimate goal being to get the teachers beyond data manipulation and into the actual analysis which can then guide instruction. I am just so excited about what went on this morning and for the future of data driven decision making at OCSD.

The afternoon was more of the same excitement. My afternoon started with introducing and revisiting technology that will affect and continue to affect OCSD next year. I talked about netbooks, OOo, Moodle, Plone, Google Apps, interactive tablets, and how technology can help with our data driven decision making. We then went into some more in-depth exploration of Google Apps and got the wheels turning on how we might use this in the classroom and beyond. There was some excellent conversations happening during this session. I was very excited about the ideas that were being discussed and I am very much looking forward to next year already.