Continuous formation

When we return from March Break, we tend to have a teacher-only day of PD and meetings.  The admin had broken the faculty into 3 groups for two sessions and hadn't planned anything for the third so I suggested I run a tech PD. Since this would be my swan song as the tech guy I wanted to do something interesting but also to value the time of the teachers. I would have 30-40 teachers at a time, so I knew I couldn't do a workshop or a "presentation" of tech so I turned to an idea I've had before -- a Choose Your Own Adventure PD.  Why?  Well, I haven't had any time to give them PD this year so I had a lot of things to share, I wanted to make sure they found it profitable, and I wanted it to be something different than what they'd done before.  (I've talked about Choose Your Own Adventure earlier on this blog here .) I had a long list of things that were new, new-er or just hadn't reached universality.  I was a little restricted because IT doesn...

[I did have 3 hours of Parent Teacher Conferences tonight, but I wanted to make sure I got my November daily post in!] I spent way too much time as a kid reading through the Choose Your Own Adventure books. Like these folks ( link ) I would map out the different paths to see what possibilities existed in the text. If you haven't ever read one, the format is pretty simple (well, to the reader).  You start at Page 1 and read a few paragraphs that are on the page, describing your situation. In "The Cave of Time" you're out hiking in the woods and come across a cave that you decide to explore.  After turning to the next page (as instructed) you are then required to make a choice, which will require you to jump to a much further page in the book (say, 18 or 27 as in the example below). From there you keep reading one page at a time, with the bottom of the page asking you to make a choice (or sending you to another page without choice).  As you can see from the na...