The best kind of CPD I’ve experienced comes from other practitioners. Online communities provide an opportunity to interact with other teachers at a home and place convenient to you. Ideas, resources and video can all be shared online. I’ve list below the two most useful ways I’ve found of interacting with other teachers online.
The Science forum on the TES (Times Educational Supplement) has plenty of enthusiastic teachers who are willing to answer queries, share good practice and act as a sounding board for your ideas. The board is organised as a series of topics, and you can either start a new topic or respond to an existing topic. The board can be used anonymously so you don’t have to reveal your identity if you are afraid to show your ignorance.
Twitter is a website that lets you post short messages (140 characters or less). People follow you and you follow other people – you can direct questions to individuals by putting @theirtwitterID at the start of a message. To make twitter easier to use, you can use a third party program like Tweetdeck (which can also post Facebook and other updates for you too!).
Follow me on twitter and say hello – I’m cleverfiend (because fiendishlyclever was too long to be my user ID)
To speed things up I’ve created lists of the science teachers I follow on Twitter (note that the teachers may talk/twitter about other topics as well as science). You can simply follow my lists and therefore follow the same professionals that I do.
Science teachers outside the UK
A word of warning about Twitter. You hear some teachers raving about twitter saying its the best thing since sliced bread and how their PLN (personal learning network) helps them develop as a teacher. I find it’s like shouting in the wind. The signal to noise ratio is extremely low, and many of the teachers on twitter (including many of the ones I follow) are only there because they like to hear the sound of their own voice rather than to engage in meaningful dialogue. I do stick with it though because it has proved to be useful on several occasions.
There are many other educators on Twitter as well as science teachers. Once you find someone you like have a look at the people they follow and follow some of them yourself. You can search Twitter for the #ASEchat tag – these are all posts (Tweets) by science educators using the Association of Science Education hashtag (#ASEChat).
Others
There are fan pages on Facebook but I’ve yet to find anything of value for CPD. You can also engage in discussion with individuals through their blogs by leaving comments. I know online communities have been set up in the past using the Ning platform but the people who run these tend to be ‘tech hippies’ jumping on every bandwagon that comes along rather than an overworked science teacher!
Let me know if you find a good online community that I haven’t mentioned – I would love to hear about it.
I was asked an interesting question by another science AST within our authority. He wanted to share some of the materials he had been generating and was interested in getting the Nottinghamshire ASTs to follow a common approach. He came to me for advice since he knows I have a web-site on which I actively share nearly all of my resources.
File sync programs can replace the carrying of USB flash drives. You simply install the software on your home and work computers, and then when you change a file on one computer the file is copied into the cloud and changed on the other computers that are in the sync relationship. This saves carrying an unreliable and old fashioned USB flash drive that you have to remember to back up.