NASA's Simulation Based Aerospace Engineering Teacher Professional Development Program is a program geared towards helping educators become skilled in teaching engineering concepts. The program includes education materials, teacher internships, and industry and higher education partnerships. The program offers US STEM teachers the opportunity to work beside NASA engineers and mentors. It is focused on aeronautics modeling and simulation and teachers explore cutting-edge technology, aerospace engineering concepts, and develop hands-on lessons.

The site has lessons from previous sessions that teachers can download and use. The lessons include the simulation and lesson plan. The resource section has downloads, information on simulations, more lesson examples, and other STEM resources and links.


Related:

More great educational resources from NASA

STEM Resources for Educators and Students

Professional development is an important part of education and educator's professional learning. Unfortunately, professional development is not always planned or delivered well, or is not relevant to the staff. Here are some tips for planning professional development:

1. Develop a professional development committee to plan and coordinate.

2. Demonstrate examples of classroom technology use, best practices, etc.

3. Use multiple needs assessment instruments. What does the staff need/want for professional development? Take a survey, email them, ask them to send in ideas. Use the EdCamp model.

4. Design individual learning plans based on the needs and wants of the staff.

5. Identify leaders who can provide expertise. This includes your own teachers and staff. You do not have to hire expensive consultants for professional development. Look inside your own school and district first.

6. Create a list of on-site learning opportunities. What are you going to offer at your school?

7. Share a list of off-site and online learning opportunities. Also share methods and resources for funding. Share free conferences, like Day of Discovery, EdCamp, TeachMeets and online conferences and more with your staff.

8. Build in time for staff planning meetings.

9. Share successes as well as expectations not yet met.

10. Continue to plan and re-evaluate often.

11. Create programs that provide on-going support. This is very important. Offering 2 hours of training is all well and good, but there must be on-going support to help teachers implement what they learn.


Related:

Professional Development for Educators needs to change

Helping Educators Get Started with Educational Technology

Free Professional Development Resource - teacher PD sourcebook

Great Articles - Professional Development 2.0

Project Based Learning is a great way to teach content, as well as other needed skills (communication, teamwork, problem solving, technology, etc) - see related for more on these skills.

Edutopia is a great resource for information and resources on Project Based Learning as it is one of their main topics. It's also a great resource for any educator for a variety of topics.

Edutopia has a great article on a new Twitter chat, #PBLchat, that just launched in December. It occurs on Tuesdays at 9pm EST, 6pm Pacific and is growing every week.

I'm a firm believer in Project Based Learning and Twitter as a resource for educators and #PBLchat just brings the two together.

Join us!



Related:

Project Based Learning Resource page

10 Important Skills Students Need for the Future

10 Tech Skills every Student Should Have

STEM Resources page

Discovery Education is an excellent resource for educators. They have great fee-based products (Streaming, Assessment, Science and more) and over 30 free resources available for educators. The Discovery Educator Network is also a great resource for educators where they can connect with other educators and share resources and information. They also provide excellent, free, professional development through out the year. These sessions are held online and there are in-person events to coincide with the online program. 


The 3rd Annual DEN SCIcon will be held this coming Saturday, January 28th. The DEN SCIcon provides participants with effective strategies for transforming science classes through effective integration of digital media content. The conference is live and online so you can join in from home. There are also in-person events around the country, hosted by the local DEN Leadership Council (made up of educators). See below for more in person events. It is all FREE.


You must register whether attending online, or an in-person event. 


The agenda is listed below and you can register for the online sessions here: http://links.discoveryeducation.com/scicon2012


This is a great opportunity to gain some great ideas and resources for free. I've participated for the last two years and it was well worth the time. 

Discovery Education is an excellent resource for educators. They have great fee-based products (Streaming, Assessment, Science and more) and over 30 free resources available for educators. The Discovery Educator Network is also a great resource for educators where they can connect with other educators and share resources and information. They also provide excellent, free, professional development through out the year. These sessions are held online and there are in-person events to coincide with the online program. 


The 3rd Annual DEN SCIcon will be held on Saturday, January 28th. The DEN SCIcon provides participants with effective strategies for transforming science classes through effective integration of digital media content. 


The agenda is listed below and you can register for the online sessions here: http://links.discoveryeducation.com/scicon2012


I will post a list of in-person events once they are announced. 


This is a great opportunity to gain some great ideas and resources for free. I've participated for the last two years and it was well worth the time. 

TappedIn is a free, interesting site for educators that describes itself as "the online workplace of an international community of education professionals. K-12 teachers and librarians, professional development staff, teacher education faculty and students, and researchers engage in professional development programs and informal collaborative activities with colleagues." It is a web-based learning environment and professional learning community for educators.

TappedIn is organized in virtual buildings for each topic and area and each building includes public, group and personal "rooms" for educators to use. Users can create their own groups and communicate via chat, private messaging, and discussion boards. Student accounts are also available. 

Professional Development for Educators needs to change. I know many schools and districts that do it right. I know many educators who have organized EdCamps to provide excellent, teacher driven professional development. I also know, and have experienced first hand, professional development that is not effective.

Professional Development in many school systems is driven by administrators and run by outside consultants and sometimes even college professors. This is all fine and good if it meets the needs of the teachers. But how many times have you attended a professional development session, just to walk out thinking "that was a waste of time for me" or "how can I use that to improve teaching and learning?"

Professional Development has to change:

1. It should be driven by teachers. What do they need or want for training? Let them decide and even run it.

2. Schools have their own in-house experts on many topics. Use them.

3. The goal of professional development is to improve teaching and learning. If it doesn't address that, don't bother. Remember to always think about how what is being presented will help the students. If it doesn't help students, should we really be spending time on it?

4. The professional development has to give the teachers concrete things that they can go back and do in their classrooms. Having someone talk about brain anatomy and physiology for an hour without any insight or application to teaching and learning is not going to help anyone.

5. Is based on the best practices in teaching and learning. It should not be the same old thing over and over again.

6. This one is from the US Department of Education: "Is planned collaboratively by those who will participate in and facilitate that development". In other words, the teachers need to be involved in the planning and implementation of the PD.

7. It should not be passive, lectures. Teachers should be involved. It should be a discussion. It should involve everyone sharing ideas and resources, not just one person at the front of the room.

8. It should not be isolated. Any professional development should include a way for participants to get assistance and feedback when they implement what they have learned. Follow up sessions, classroom visits, and personal support are needed to ensure that what is learned, is applied properly.

Professional Development has to be timely, effective, engaging, applicable to the classroom, focused on improving teaching and learning, teacher driven, and relevant to the needs of the participants. Participants should be able to implement at least one resource or strategy from the professional development immediately in their classroom.

Discovery Education provides some excellent professional development opportunities, both live and on-line.

What are  your thoughts, experiences, and ideas about Professional Development?

UPDATE: 11/15/2011

There have been some great comments below, as well as on Twitter, regarding PD for educators. One comment that has come up more than once regarding teacher choice in PD, is that "teachers don't always know what they need for training." While this is sometimes true when there is something new out in terms of research, techniques, technology, etc., teachers do know what area they want help in. My colleagues tell me all the time that they want more PD on improving our students reading comprehension in all subject areas.  huge majority of our students read many grade levels below where they should be and that affects their ability and learning in every class. Teachers know where they need help. They need to be able to get PD in these areas.

Related:

Free Professional Development Resource - teacher PD sourcebook

I've been sharing conferences and professional development opportunities (like EdCampCT, Day of Discovery, TechForum, and more) with my colleagues for years. Most are free. Yet I am very discouraged and upset by the response I get from many of my colleagues: "Will we get CEU's for this? If not, I'm not going."

This is sad. As educators, we should know better and be more motivated to go and learn to improve ourselves as professionals. Too many times, I see teachers attending really good, quality training, and not paying attention. They are only there to get their mandatory CEU requirements completed. They don't want to, or in some cases, care to learn anything new. Some of the veteran teachers also have the attitude of "what can they teach me?"

I want to improve myself as an educator. As a paramedic and engineer I did the same thing. I went beyond what I have to do for certification requirements and learned all I could. I took extra classes and went to conferences. I read journals on my profession.

Now, as a professional educator, I want to learn as much as I can. I read journals, spend time on Twitter learning from other educators, and attend conferences and unconferences. I even attend many virtual conferences. I am always learning and I always feel that I have something more to learn. I wish all educators felt this way.

SimpleK12 is a great site that has a tremendous amount of resources for educators. They offer online professional development, curriculum resources, assessment ideas, free downloads and resource kits and resources through their blog, I Love EdTech.


SimpleK12 is also know for their bunny slippers! They promote their online offerings as a way to learn while in your pajamas and the bunny slippers have become their symbol. I was chatting with some of the SimpleK12 staff at ISTE2011 and they were all wearing their bunny slippers.

I've spoken about Twitter in education before as a main part of my Personal Learning Network. But I wanted to expand on it some more. 


Twitter is a great social networking site that allows you only 140 characters per Tweet. This forces people to make their point succinctly, but many people use it to send out links to other articles or resources. I don't use it for keeping up with "friends" per se. I use it to connect to other educators. 


Twitter is a great way to connect, share, discover, discuss, and learn about education. It's a type of on-demand professional development (which I've learned more from than years of traditional professional development).


Here are links to articles that have a list of great educational hashtags to follow. Hashtags are a way to sort Tweets by topic. You can search all of Twitter for these hashtags. As you find users who post good stuff, you can follow them directly too.


All about #edchat - a great resource on Twitter - #edchat has won awards for best Influential Tweets.  This is a great place to start on Twitter.

28 Education and Technology Keywords Or Hashtags To Follow on Twitter

Cybrary Man's Educational HashTags

EduCon 2.3 is another educational conference coming up soon. It will be held in Philadelphia, January 28-30, 2011. What's very cool is that you can attend digitally if you want to!

Like the other three conferences I mentioned in my last post, EduCon 2.3 is an "unconference" and is a conversation of issues and ideas about education. Many of the people from my PLN are attending and/or presenting and it should be a great weekend.

I don't think I'll be able to attend physically, but I will be attending digitally.

There are some very cool educational "conferences" or "unconferences" coming up that everyone should check out. These three are all in the Northeast (NY, NJ, and MA). They are all FREE!

EdCampNYC - EdCamp NYC is an unconference about K-12 education issues and ideas. It is Saturday, December 4th, 2010 and will be held at the School at Columbia University in NYC. You choose what sessions you want to attend and you can even leave a session and choose a different one. They are not presentations so much as conversations and a sharing of ideas and concerns. 

Creating a Personal Learning Network with Web 2.0 Tools is a site that helps teachers set up and create a PLN. It has information and resources from multiple teachers and includes a variety of resources for teachers to use to connect with other educators. The site was created as part of a presentation for FETC 2009.

I'm a huge proponent of PLNs and this is definitely a great site to use to create or expand your own PLN.

Related Articles:
http://educationaltechnologyguy.blogspot.com/p/create-personal-learning-network.html

Discovery Education is presenting the Discovery Educator Network Fall Virtual Conference on Saturday, October 23rd at 9am. FREE!

The virtual conference is a great way to get some free professional development, learn about new things, and make new connections with other educators. You can attend online, at home, or there are even some in-person regional events hosted by DEN Leadership Councils.

There will be presenters from around the DEN (Discovery Educator Network) and some special guests.

I have attended these in the past and they are very good! I highly recommend them.

Jason Bedell is a member of my PLN. He and I have similar views on education and he has recently written 21 articles on his blog entitled "Professional Development 2.0". These articles are informative, easy to read, timely, and very relevant to the needs of all educators. I highly suggest reading them. 


Professional Development does not have to be, and shouldn't be, a bunch of teachers sitting in a room being lectured by some "expert" who probably hasn't been in a classroom in 20 years. It should be educators sharing ideas, tips, resources, and how they have overcome obstacles. A PLN is part of your professional development network. Use it! 


Here is a list of the topics he has covered:

• Introduction to the New Professional Development
• Old and New
• What is a PLN?
• Parts of a New PLN
• What’s all that tweeting about?
• Why Twitter?
• Instant PLN!
• Investing in the Follower/Following Relationship
• Differentiating Development with the Educator’s PLN
• How Building a PLN Can Help Your Students
• What’s the Difference Between Social Media and Social Networking
• Introduction to Social Bookmarking
• How Social Bookmarking Works
• Characteristics of a Reflective Educator
• Writing to Grow – an Introduction to Blogging
• Why a Blog Instead of a Private Journal?
• Where to Start Blogging
• How to Find and Follow Great Blogs
• Comments – The Currency of Blogs
• Blogging With Students
• The Secret of Any Conference
• TweetUps – Meetings on Your Terms
• What is an Unconference?
• Find an Unconference Near You
• No Unconferences Nearby? Start your Own.