This week’s Daytime sessions:

Willow Grove Campus – Day 6, Wednesday 9 – 10 in room B-29 (second floor, in the same hallway as the T2)

Cherokee Campus – Day 7, Thursday 12 – 1 in the Carpenter Gallery.

January is awesome.  Temperatures are almost always below freezing, it’s pretty much dark by lunch time, I get to warm my car up for 10 minutes before driving to work, the Eagles annual playoff exit is imminent (although a bit earlier this year), some (NOT ME) consider this to be the doldrums of the NHL season, and finally, I get to continually hear the phrase “pitchers & catchers” in a few weeks.  Wow, if that doesn’t get ya motivated, I don’t know what will??  At this point, while I write at 6:30 AM on a cold Tuesday morning, I’d like to provide a bit of motivation for the rest of the week, what better way to do that than by providing a clip from one of my favorite movies, Braveheart.  While there are at least half a dozen scenes in this movie that make me want to put on my sneakers and run to work, I had to find one sans questionable language.  With that I give you Robert the Bruce (the music gets me every time):

Back to business, hopefully you’ve read my two previous Daytime posts to know that last week I concluded an experiment in which I compared two methods of professional development to further analyze Alan November’s Pro-D-Flip.  I don’t want to re-write last week’s post so I’ll summarize quickly – after reading a tweet about a Webinar based on a conversation between November and Dr. Eric Mazur discussing Mazur’s work on flipped learning and peer instruction, I decided to hold of on listening to the Webinar until I had attended last week’s Advis Event “Interactive Learning: – Technology in the Classroom, with Eric Mazur, Ph.D.”  Ultimately, my goal was to compare the two, to find if it was worth almost an entire work day, including travel time, to go to Malvern Prep to see Dr. Mazur in person, when I could simply listen to the presentation via the archived Webinar.  Rather than regurgitating the information from the each of the presentations, I’m going to post the Webinar and HIGHLY SUGGEST that you listen to it in it’s entirety.  Yes, it’s 53 minutes, but it’s well worth your time.  I actually downloaded the Webinar, synced it with my iPhone, and listened to it on the drive home from Malvern.  I was able to listen to it all in one sitting because I’m the worst with directions and ended up missing my exit on the turnpike which resulted in an extra 30 miles of driving….awesome.  Keep reading for a link to the Webinar.

In the end, while it was good to get away from my daily routine to listen to a highly regarded educator, my conclusion is that I didn’t gain much from the live event that I wouldn’t have been able to learn from the Webinar.  Furthermore, I could’ve saved $40 as well as the extra money spend on the additional 30 miles on the turnpike!  My goal of this post is certainly not to deter you from exploring external PD opportunities (I have at least 3 outside events that I’ll be attending in the next few weeks), it’s simply to tell you that there are additional ways to, for lack of a better phrase, develop professionally.  Whether is your kid’s basketball game, a doctor appointment, a haircut, or your favorite episode of Three’s Company on TV (what a classic show!), we all have busy lives outside of our career’s.  However, I would argue that collectively we can’t forget that it’s our duty to grow as educators, I know I have a lot of progress to make!

Now I’m going to Flip Daytime a bit here.  Your assignment is to watch/listen to the Socrates Meets Flip And Facebook Webinar, come back to the blog, and engage in some peer instruction based on the questions you all have on Mazur’s methodologies.  We can do this virtually via the “comments” section of the blog, or we can form a small team that would like to discuss further, including the possibility of testing out the Learning Catalytics platform (click below for a video) let me know!  I know I certainly don’t have all of the answers, and some of you been using some sort of “flipped” approach whether you’re aware of it or not.  So why not discuss as a group?

To close the blog I’m going to link to this video that demonstrates the aforementioned Learning Catalytics, which is a tool that Dr. Mazur says “allows him to visualize student learning in new and exciting ways.  Again, please let me know if you would like to further explore this platform.

Digital Tools:

Photo Pin: A free search engine for photographs that are free to use for blogs and other types of media.  Photo Pin is a great way to teach good digital citizenship by showing awareness to the Web’s copyright rules.

Ooloone – A visual search engine that displays all results graphically.  It’s a nice alternative to Google for our younger learners that works great on all devices, including the iPad.  Might be a good idea to create a shortcut on the iPad desktop for our LS divisions.