Professional Learning Facilitator
Coaches plan, provide, and evaluate the impact of professional learning for educators and leaders to use technology to advance teaching and learning.
ISTE Standards for Coaches (2017). https://www.iste.org/standards/iste-standards-for-coaches
Professional Learning Network
Each day is a chance to learn and grow, many share this sentiment with our students, but we also need to embody and model this action to them. Professional learning provides that opportunity, especially with the advances in technology increasing. “A PLN is a network of people and resources that support ongoing learning (Morris, 2018).” The idea of taking charge of PD, or professional development, for one’s own growth and success, is necessary. Each year we get a new group of students and what worked one year, might not work for the following year. Let’s take classroom management techniques that may need tweaking for the new group of students coming this year, but your workplace might have scheduled for later in the year. A teacher should not let her classroom be all haywire and out of control until then. We all know that with the pandemic of 2020 our students lost valuable time at school (Fisher, et al., 2020). We must play catch up in a way and basically, retrain and organize ourselves and them into the structure it once was, but this leaves room to do it even better and provide more engagement with technology usage. Three strategies that could easily be implemented with any subject are making connections, making accurate and inspiring content with technology, and making the time, as it will be worth it at the end of the day. This can help an educator improve their classroom and create a tool to fall back on when they need to refresh their minds on a topic or project and help others in the same boat.
Fisher, D., Frey, N., and Hattie, J. (2020). The distance learning playbook, grades K-12: Teaching for engagement and impact in any setting (1st ed.). Corwin. ISBN-13: 9781071828922 https://www.gcumedia.com/digital-resources/sage/2020/the-distance-learning-playbook-grades-k-12_teaching-for-engagement-and-impact-in-any-setting_1e.php
Morris, K. (2018). Step 1: What is a PLN? Teacher challenge. Edublogs. https://web.archive.org/web/20200430114944/https://teacherchallenge.edublogs.org/pln-define/
Professional Resources
1) Scratch Educators Facebook: This is a coding resource community of educators who share ideas, questions, and resources related to teaching with Scratch.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/TeachingwithScratch
​
2) Typetastic Blog: It is never too early to learn to type, and this can help reinforce letter recognition with kindergarten, and help students practice motor skills.
​
3) FBI Resource Page: With the increase of technology and internet access being free and easily available wherever you go, students must learn to be safe online.
https://sos.fbi.gov/resource-page
​
4) Teacher Pay Teachers Blog: Teachers are helping each other and providing digital content like images, slideshows, and more through this website.
https://blog.teacherspayteachers.com/
​
5) Canva Blog: Social media has increased the importance of eye-catching graphics and Canva is an easy source, the blog provides ideas of things to create from postcards for social studies courses to cards for the holidays.
​
6) Common Sense Education Twitter: This social media account provides free tools and resources for educators teaching about digital citizenship.
​
7) Student Learning& Partner Success Teacher Blog: Teachers need to be motivated at times, and this provides fun engaging training, raffles, and more to support all teachers.
https://slps.sufs.org/category/teacher-resources/
​
8) Minecraft Blog: Mimicking many online games, Minecraft has made an education account and provides training for teachers who would love to use this for history or math courses, even science through virtual worlds pre-design to help students learn. The blog is full of ideas, and inspiration.
https://education.minecraft.net/en-us/blog
​
9) We Are Teachers Newsletters: This resource is broken down by grade levels, to provide teachers with ideas and inspiration needed for their exact classroom.
https://www.weareteachers.com/newsletters/
​
10) Headspace blog: Technology is important and useful, but we must put our mental health above all, and many social media outlets are allowing harmful content that lowers self-esteem, and confidence. Headspace provides meditation, lessons on stress and burnout, and helps provide positivity in a virtual world full of critics and hate.
Student View:
https://frm.tv/join/VD84EA
​
Educator View: https://app.formative.com/clone/R25LZG?_rid=fvn1ot