In this week’s assignment, I taught myself how to create a video that focuses on directing change in professional development. At our college, we have scheduled professional development meetings quarterly. At most meetings, we have a speaker in the morning who gives us tips to use in our classrooms, and then we take online professional development classes for the rest of the afternoon (MaxKnowledge). 
Sometimes, teachers can’t attend the meetings, but they can still complete the online training. The biggest problem I see with this model is the inclination for many teachers to skip through the modules and quickly take the exams at the end. Many teachers even share the answers to the module quizzes. This suggests that teachers find the online courses irrelevant or even useless to them. I’ve actually enjoyed some of the courses, but I can honestly say I have never implemented what I’ve learned in my own classroom. Most of what I implement comes from ideas I’ve heard others use successfully: games like Kahoot or Quizizz, giving students group projects or activities that I develop on my own. I truly think a lot of how we teach mirrors how we were taught as students. Today, there are so many technological tools we can use in the classroom that will help make lessons more engaging, interactive, and interesting for our students. The problem is that many teachers may be afraid to use technology, or don’t know where to start. We recently had a lesson on how to use Kahoot; the tutorials were great, but I haven’t heard of one teacher trying it for the first time in their own class since we attended that P.D. session. Many teachers really need more personalized coaching and help in their own classrooms to feel comfortable enough to implement something new.
While I’m still learning how to improve professional development, I created a short plug for this new type of P.D. Making a movie was something completely new for me, and it took a lot of trial and error. I had grand ideas for how I wanted it to flow, but eventually decided to keep it simple, using still pictures and music with a voiceover. After researching different apps, I went with iMovie because it is easy to use and has a lot of options for music and special effects. It’s fairly easy to edit, and works in an intuitive way. I spent several hours learning how to use it to edit my short movie. I’ll definitely practice more with it because I can see its value for future applications in my own classroom as well!
Here’s what I created:
cruzconnect 