My 25% PD

So this week I managed about 300 minutes of PD time. I like using minutes rather then hours just because it looks like a lot more time. 🙂

Arvind Grover posted this to my original 25% PD and it had me thinking this week:

Jeff, although I never thought of it in the way you describe it, that is exactly how my professional development works. I have been avoiding relaxing by the TV and have been relaxing by reading, reading and reading more blogs and educational technology news all the time. I think the transformation of the web from singular websites, to those connected with all types of social-networking strategies has let our exploration of the web explode.

I can relate! During the night my wife and I sit down to relax, she grabs a book or watches TV, I grad the laptop and read or watch videos or listen to a podcast. I donÂ’t remember the last time I watched a TV show. We watch movies together, but other then that the TV doesnÂ’t interest me. There is no NCAA basketball or MLB baseball games on here in China so I get my sports fix from the Internet as well. I also go thinking about the 300 minutes that I quoted earlier. This is just time I spend at school. If I was to add up the amount of time I spend before and after school reading and learning IÂ’m sure it would be well over 1000 minutes each week. Further more, I find the more blogs and websites I visit the more ideas I have for the 6 different web sites IÂ’m trying to keep up with. That is way this week I included in my PD the 2 hours I spend working on a site figuring out .php and css pages. The little php coding I know IÂ’ve learned through maintaining this and the other blogs that IÂ’m now running/overseeing. Should I also count the hours IÂ’ve put in this week putting together a class IÂ’m teaching starting next week on using Moodle in the classroom? IÂ’ve been collecting, reading, reviewing, and thinking about how I want the class to be structured.

All of this added up to a lot of learning, all individualized and all ready waiting for me when IÂ’m ready to learn. To tired? Go to bed. CanÂ’t sleep? Get up and learn. The information is just waiting to be processed. IÂ’m just realized that I havenÂ’t watch news on the TV for months now; I keep up through my rss feeds of the news channels that interest me.

What does this mean for our students? How can using blogs, wikis, rss feeds, course management systems, and other web applications allow for our students to have this same access to personal individualized information in an educational manner?

This weeks sites:

Seedlings Podcast @Bit by Bit: Show 02

http://music.podshow.com/index.php
Great music for podcasters

http://schoolof.info/infomancy/?p=164
For all my library friends

http://batchgeocode.com/
Batch geo code address into longitude and latitude to be placed on Google maps.

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/internet_utilities/tickershock.html
Ticker like on CNN only runs RSS feeds. For Macs

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/1,70254-0.html
Great article on myspace

http://schoolof.info/infomancy/?p=168
Chris Harris has a great posting about myspace and other thoughts

http://video.google.com/
This is great, but according to the site “Playback is not available in my country” shucks!

http://www.springdoo.com/
Add voice to your e-mail

http://www.allofmp3.com/
Cheap legal music downloads from Russia

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