5 Tech Tools That Help Personalize PD: As More Districts Take Advantage of Social Media, Online Surveys and More, the Days of One-Size-Fits-All Professional Development Are Over

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] STUDENTS AREN'T the only ones who can benefit from differentiated instruction. Teachers, too, have individual strengths and weaknesses, and they need different types of professional development at specific points of their careers. So why clump them all together in the same PD courses? Some school districts around the country are finding new ways to use social media/and online offerings in combination with professional learning communities to empower teachers to develop their own personalized PD plans and reflect on how that PD is affecting the work they do in class. THE Journal spoke with leaders in several of these districts about the role of technology in personalizing the PD process. Turning to Twitter Joe Sanfelippo, superintendent of Fall Creek School District near Eau Claire, WI, has become something of an evangelist for using Twitter in educators' professional development. For me, it has been the best platform that have ever experienced, he said. I already live there socially, but now have connections to people professionally who are doing amazing things. Having them at my fingertips for feedback is phenomenal. You get your learning needs met whenever you want. Sanfelippo can pose a question on Twitter and get an answer back almost immediately. Whether he is looking for resources about how to help his teachers with Mystery Skype (a global guessing game that gets kids learning with Skype) or project-based learning, he said, I can use hashtags and tag a few people who have been involved in that topic and they will retweet it and we can get this rich conversation started. With Twitter, he said, you can get your learning done wherever you want, on your own time. is what PD has to be, he declared. It is no longer sitting in a room for eight hours and then being sent back to your classroom. That just doesn't work. Sanfelippo suggests that teachers in his district use Twitter in the same way. A year and a half ago, he encouraged all the teachers to set up Twitter accounts. They held sessions after school to help them navigate tweets, hashtags and Twitter chats. have held staff meetings via Twitter chat to show them how it works, he said. Now a number of Fall Creek teachers are engaging in Twitter chats and interacting with other teachers across the country. want kids to learn whatever they want to learn, he said. Well, we want our teachers to do that, too. We need to lead the learning in our organizations. Experimenting With Digital Badges Digital badges have become a hot topic as an alternative form of assessment for students in K.-12 and higher education. The Teacher Learning Journeys platform developed at Penn State University tested the use of digital badges for PD activities with nearly 100 science teachers in 2012 and 2013. Funded by a grant from NASA, the platform is designed to allow teachers to engage with content that interests them and progress at their own pace. During the test, teachers had access to a set of 63 PD activities related to skills and content knowledge focused on weather and climate science, engineering and the solar system. Using badges, teachers could electronically display the PD activities that they had completed. Researchers studied how professional learners used badges for goal-setting and tracking progress. Chris Gararat, instructional designer in the Online Learning Design and Innovation Office of Penn State's College of Information Sciences and Technology, said, made the argument that teachers are in different places professionally and it makes sense to offer them choices about what they want to learn to better themselves as teachers and enhance their classrooms. The PD activities included synchronous webinars and online discussions as well as archived webinars and tutorials. Once they completed an activity, teachers could submit a reflective activity log to receive microcredentials. …