Having been recently invited to join my district’s Leadership Development Program, I spent the better part of two days this week in the first module, which focused on developing “Professional Learning Communities”.

It was an interesting couple of days, with many opportunities to share and influence through conversations. I’ll add more at a later date as I continue along this path, but I do have two quick observations.

One of the questions we were asked to ponder was the mission, vision, purpose and structure of school.  Guess they decided to start us off with the small stuff first!  It was interesting as many offered learning, preparing students for the future, citizenship.  Some even talked about 21st century learning.  I think some even recognized that there was a shift taking place, but most were not able to offer why.

Of the 19 people in the module, I was a bit lonely as the only one who offered that access to networked digital information was crucial to learning environments in the 21st century.

I was able to share some of my understandings.  One of the focus’ of the program is to promote professional reading.  After peeking in on my feedreader on Friday morning before the sessions and immediatelty seeing it’s value, the coordinator asked if I would share this at sometime during the day.  Later, after a break, I was able to share reading blogs – in addition to academic reading – as a learning tool and how to use RSS and feedreaders to bring the info to the learner.  In addition, I was able to share with my fellow learners the power of podcasts (specifically podcasts available FREE through the iTunes store).  This was a wow moment for many. Kewl!

tags: technology, education, learning, whipple