Teachers Training Teachers

My school district PDC committee is in charge of planning out our in-service days throughout the year. A few years back they started having one of our full day in-service sessions be one in which teachers train teachers. What happens is that an teaching interest inventory is sent out several months in advance. Teachers have the opportunity to submit ideas for classes they would like to teach during that in-service day. Then from those classes, another inventory is sent out to see which classes staff members want to sign up for. This year we used a program called Sign Up Genius to collect responses for who wants to join each class. This is a super easy and FREE website to use for organizing volunteers for events, sign ups for events, etc. My school even uses it for parents to sign up for parent-teacher conferences. Once teachers are all signed up, final plans are made for which classrooms will be used for the sessions and the instructors finish designing their presentations. Our topic of focus this year is on technology. All teachers for the sessions must focus their presentation on something involving technology. I will be teaching two sessions. One is called 30 Sites in 60 Minutes and I am including a link to the site I am going to use to teach that session. Its from scoop.it. This session will include links to many different websites that I have encountered over the years that are the most helpful with educational technology. I will be adding to this "scoop" as I find more sites, so keep checking back to it!  Our sessions are actually going to be more like 75 minutes long, but the extra time will be given for teachers to explore some of the sites they have been introduced to. My other session I will be teaching will be on Google Spreadsheets. As soon as I get something ready to share, I'll include a link for it. I've not completed my presentation for that session yet. I have found so many uses for Google Drive in my classroom and in my personal life. If you haven't looked into all that Google has to offer, you are missing out! Our school has the Google Apps for Education package, so every teacher and student in the district has a school-sponsored Google account. It was a very worthy investment!

I like to share a motivational quote with many posts (going to work harder on that), so here is my last thought to leave you with.