Professional Development & Personal Learning Environments

Among most school reformers, it is commonly recognized that professional development is the primary vehicle for bringing about needed change. Yet many districts report that teachers and administrators are disappointed in their professional development experiences. Professional development plans, on too many occasions, have been tossed aside, revised, and abandoned for lack of meaningful purpose and participation. Many school districts that have failed at professional development have associated their failure with the lack of commitment from school personnel. In turn, school personnel, largely because of their past experiences, believe that professional development programs fail because they are ineffective in improving student learning. More than any other profession, education has endured a steady stream of fads and short-termed innovations that produced little or no improvement. Consequently, veteran teachers often respond to innovations in education with the following advice, "Don't worry; this too shall pass."

These dissatisfactions have become well known within the teaching profession and among state policy developers. Consequently, legislators, policy makers, and the general public are not willing to fund programs without evidence of effective results. Therefore, in most of America's schools, professional development programs are woefully underfunded and consequently often terribly ineffective.

If professional development programs are to continue in our public educational system, then professional development practices must undergo a change-a change that would meet the needs of the individual practitioner as well as those of the school as a whole. No professional development program could ever be deemed successful unless the plan itself addresses the needs of the students and stipulates how their learning will improve.

To offset these ideas schools should embrace the professional development needs of teachers through a different media. A media that promotes the ideas of developing professional learning environments through the use of social media. Social media that provides the necessary resources in aggregation, curation and creation. These are the same skills that students need in order to work effectively in the new emerging workforce. These are the skills of learning how to develop personal learning environments that are cost effective and can point to the overall goal of the school as it moves closer to creating open networks of Classrooms without Walls.

The best examples of connected schools are the schools who have created 1to1 mobile learning opportunities. In these schools, the individual staff members come together with different values, education, skills, motivation, and beliefs. Each member of the instructional staff has an inherent belief about how the education of students should be conducted in his or her classroom. These are the student centered schools. These are the schools who are changing the landscape of instruction to fit the learning needs of their students. These are the schools that are Creating Classrooms without Walls, where professional development is designed to fit the learning needs of the 21st century. 

The greatest challenge for these schools has been to develop a cohesive unit in which each individual performs optimally in his or her assigned role while supporting others in theirs. Mutual trust, shared visions, good internal communication, effective judgment under stress, and adherence to goals must all be learned by individual participation.

In all cases, these types of professional development built upon the idea of developing personal learning environments have been a proven way for connected schools to increase their readiness levels for coping with new changes and opportunities. Connected schools are prepared to handle those change issues that have already emerged and will be well equipped in this age of continuing school reform. Beyond this, connected schools must learn how to cope with a wide range of possible learning theories that may involve many changing strategies in order to fulfill the needs of the students whom they serve. True connected schools have learned to cope with change at the individual, group, and organizational levels. They have coped with new standards developed by legislative mandates or by what the latest research teaches them about effective educational practices. These are the school who are motivated to create personal learning environments. Where individuals and groups of teachers explore Web 2.0 resources that can be applied to the classroom setting. They are creative teachers who find, learn and apply Web 2.0 resources to instructional strategies that are proven to be effective. These are the connected schools who support the development of Personal Learning Environments.

Personal Learning Environment

The Personal Learning Environment model is fast becoming recognized as the most flexible, multi-faceted, and individualized approach to learning in education today. To provided continuous learning the professional development plan should explore specific ways in creating a Personal Learning Environment. Ways to use social networking tools for the educational enhancement in everyday learning and how PLEs will become central to applications in the classroom.

In the connected school where Personal Learning Environments thrive teachers, and school leaders learn how changing technologies are key drivers in exploring ways to develop a system that helps manage their own learning. This includes providing support for teachers to set their own learning goals, manage their learning, manage both content and process, and communicate with others in the process of learning. They establish internal and external networks of professional growth by networking through aggregation tools. These are the Aggregation tools that allow each teacher to research the web by tagging and sharing webpage's. They spend their some of their professional learning time networking with other professional educators using aggregation  services like diigo or delicious, and then bookmark their researched websites that interest them by labeling it and using keywords called tags.

Using Aggregation Tools to Enhance Professional Learning

Aggregation is the act of collecting content from multiple resources of information and then pulling information together into one information pool. In education aggregating information can help in topic selection as the aggregation tools seeks out topics lessening the one line search results. Social network aggregation is the process of collecting content from multiple social network services. The task is often performed by a social network aggregator, which pulls together information into a single location, or helps a user consolidate multiple social networking profiles into one profile.

Various aggregation services provide tools or widgets to allow users to consolidate messages, track friends, combine bookmarks, search across multiple social networking sites, read RSS feeds for multiple social networks, see when their name is mentioned on various sites, access their profiles from a single interface, provide "lifestreams". Social network aggregation services attempt to organize or simplify a user's social networking experience, although the idea has been satirized by the concept of a "social network aggregator aggregator."

Social network aggregation is the process of collecting content from multiple social network services. The task is often performed by a social network aggregator, which pulls together information into a single location, or helps a user consolidate multiple social networking profiles into one profile. Various aggregation services provide tools or widgets to allow users to consolidate messages, track friends, combine bookmarks, search across multiple social networking sites, read RSS feeds for multiple social networks, see when their name is mentioned on various sites, access their profiles from a single interface. Social network aggregation services attempt to organize or simplify a user's social networking experience, although the idea has been satirized by the concept of a "social network aggregator.

• WebList Weblist is a tool for creating visual lists of websites, displayed as thumbnails. Use Weblist to create lists of websites for students, without the distraction of the free web! Create your list of URLs centered on a specific theme to combine it into one URL. Save it as a smart bookmark or as a customizable home page, share it with friends via email or through the top social media networks, and post it on your blog. Weblist (http://weblist.me) Weblist lets you pull together and organize content on the web. Create a list of urls centered on a theme and combine them into one easy to navigate url weblist. The list can be saved as a bookmark or a homepage. Weblist is particularly useful for the primary elementary classroom because of its visual aspect. Each website is saved as a snapshot of that website with the website name and a description below. The visual organization is perfect for younger students who may not be able to navigate links designated by text alone.
• Delicious is a bookmarking service that is specifically designed for saving and sharing bookmarks. It is useful tool for educators because the software application allows for the storage and categorization of hundreds of links to interesting web sites. Delicious makes it easy to store links all in one place. When used in the classroom students can publish links for other class members to use especially when developing classroom collaborative projects.  The power of Delicious as an educational tool is in making  bookmarks accessible to other students in a learning community, and makes everyone else’s bookmarks available to those who are invited to join the learning community. 
• By ‘tagging’ your bookmark on Delicious with brief one or two word descriptors, enables a search to be conducted across the entire site for bookmarks others have labeled with similar interest. Therefore if you have a particular interest in say ‘Literacy 2.0’, and you do a search across Delicious, you will aggregate all of the sites that have been tagged ‘Literacy 2.0’ by popularity. The process of searching by tags leads to the discovery of content rich environments where in-depth learning can occur. Delicious can be used then as a process of post holing knowledge into deeper meaning of content. 

Using Curation Tools to Enhance Professional Learning

Professional development in connected schools should support the idea of Digital curation as the process of establishing and developing long term repositories of digital assets. These are the same assess that are now being used for current and future reference by researchers, scientists, historians, writers and scholars. Professional development programs should provide in-services on how to utilize digital curation tools to improve the quality of information and data that coincides with the overall goals of their professional development plan. A professional development plan that provides the methodologies of effective instruction while paralleling curating resources that expands opportunities to create ongoing professional learning environments.

• Tweeted Times: is a real-time topical personalized newspaper produced from a Twitter account. The Tweeted Times aggregates news in your Twitter stream and ranks them by popularity among those who you follow. The application rebuilds a subscribed users newspaper hourly which allows subcribers to create a newspaper for any topic of interest. The aggregation tool is made possible Semantic Dimension, Inc. You can access the application online or download it to a mobile platform such as iPad or iPhone.
• Tweeted Times for iPad
• Paper.li is created by Smallrivers. With Paper.li, users can create up to 10 newspapers based on Each news paper is an aggregation of Twitter posts which meet one of those criteria and contain a link. Each newspaper updates at least once every 24 hours. One of the coolest ways to use Paper.li is too use it along with Listerous. Listerous is a Twitter list directory, where you can find a list on almost any subject you can think of. You can take any one of those list and create a newspaper out of it in Paper.li
• Paper.li for iPad
• LiveBinders is a way for users to bookmark and showcase WebPages in a categorical format using tabs to organize web url's. The user can select a broad topic category like "Learning Support Tools" designed to help struggling students and then organize sub categories around language development through the use of tabs. It is suggested that the user install the bookmark tool to the browser by dragging a widget to the taskbar. The bookmark tool will then work the same way as any social book-marking resource, like Delicious. Live Binders (http://livebinders.com) Live Binders is a website that allows you to view links like pages in a book instead of urls on a page. PDF and Word documents can also be combined with links in a binder. Links and documents can be organized into tabs and sub-tabs. Live Binders are easy to share from the Live Binder website, on desktops, or embedded in a class blog, wiki, or website.
• Pinterest - A relatively new site that is growing at a record pace.  It's easy to use, ideal for curating the web (by saving/sharing favorite sites), and visually engaging for users.  There's lots of potential for education as it is being used by educators everywhere.
• Bag the Web - Bag the Web is a great site for curating the web into "bags".  With their educational portal, teachers and students can share resources, collect information for assignments, embed them into a site, and more.
• MentorMob - A site that has been getting quite a bit of press on Twitter lately, is one of the best around for curating the web into "playlists".  These playlists can contain different types of media such as: video, articles, pictures etc.  Once these playlists are created they can be rated and shared w/ others.
• Middlespot - Is a unique site that allows a user to browse the web and stick sites onto their "dashboard"  These dashboards can be edited and shared w/ others.  More features are available for a paid account.
• Bundlr - A great way to organize the web into "bundles".  These bundles can contain all sorts of media and then be shared w/ others in a grid or timeline view.
• Searcheeze - Another fun site for curating web content (text, video, images, articles) and turning it into a digital magazine that can be shared w/ others.
• Themeefy - A cool way to curate web content and then publish it to a digital magazine.
• Storify - A great site for telling social stories by curating web content through video, photos, and text.

Research about professional development is extensive, and opinions exist that support an abundance of approaches. However, the authors, who both have extensive experience in education practice, believe that a clear vision and goals must guide the best educational reform in regard to professional development. Further, the vision and goals must have been initiated and carried out by the teachers and other school personnel of the particular school site.

Connected schools are founded on a different set of standards than schools founded on traditional practices. The connected schools are places where both the professional educators and the students are engaged in active learning based on self-improvement goals. These are the schools that have created learning environments without walls , where the role of the educator is to seek out expanded learning opportunities that benefit not only student learning but that of the school as a whole and the teaching profession. There are many factors that contribute to connected schools, but one of the major factors is the development of a successful personal learning environment that promotes school related goals. program. The following is a list of essential professional development characteristics present in the overall development of Classrooms without Walls.