Brian C. Smith's List: Framework for Modern Professional Learning

• The new tools and processes of Web 2.0, such as blogs, social bookmarking sites, podcasting and RSS, enable individual, continual, and highly customized experiences through the creation of a personal learning environment.
• The PLE is responsible for connecting individuals to form a community of learners, where all contribute and collaborate in what amounts to a global discussion of ideas. This discussion can and does have profound application to personal professional learning, and is driven by all those who participate.

• • I still read the books pushed by school admins. Even if to push back against the thought process.
• • Transition from personal/professional to classroom practitioner.
• • Departmentalized not personalized.
• • thus extending learning practice through reflection and conversation.
• there are few portals through which new knowledge about teaching and learning can enter schools; few structures or processes in which teachers and administrators can assimilate, adapt, and polish new ideas and practices; and few sources of assistance for those who are struggling to understand the connection between the academic performance of their students and the practices in which they engage.
• Teachers rarely get to self-select learning opportunities, pursue professional passions, or engage in meaningful, ongoing conversations about instruction.
• What makes professional development even more frustrating to practitioners is that most of the programs we are exposed to are drawn directly from the latest craze sweeping the business world.
• Although most of my colleagues recognize that business-driven reform efforts are likely to have little effect on student learning, they are largely unwilling to challenge the status quo.
• beginning to believe in the human capacity of their faculties
• thousands of accomplished educators are now writing blogs about teaching and learning, bringing transparency to both the art and the science of their practice.
• With the investment of a bit of time and effort, I've found a group of writers to follow who expose me to more interesting ideas in one day than I've been exposed to in the past 10 years of costly professional development.
• Feed readers are probably the most important digital tool for today's learner
• Bloggers spend significant time pushing their own thinking—and having their thinking pushed by others.
• Digital tools have also changed who I am as an instructor because I've introduced these tools to my students.

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• considers Twitter one of his best sources of real-time professional development. "I'm able to get information and find opportunities I wouldn't have been able to gather on my own," he says.
• Teachers who are fans say they appreciate the easy-to-use tool as a quick way to network with colleagues. They like being able to ask and answer questions, learn from experts, share resources, and react to events on the fly.
• The best way to weigh the pros and cons of this free tool is to try it yourself.
• But he hasn't given up on it completely. "I think it has great potential if people use it to track inputs around specific topics -- say, educators in a Twitter group who share tidbits from ed-tech books they are reading, talk about great purchase deals, or even do simple tech Q&A."
• using Twitter for professional development is a good model for twenty-first-century learning. He's found it especially useful for learning how to integrate podcasting, blogs, wikis, and other tools in his classroom. And if he runs into a challenge, he knows right where to turn for help. "I can watch and learn from people who jump out and try things early," he says. "Once I gather information from observing, then I'm ready to apply it myself in my situation. Watch, observe, apply. It's been great."

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• At some point you also realized that those small day-to-day interactions over the back fence about each others’ strawberries and Little League games and dog walks and sandwiches have somehow added up to something more enduring: lasting friendships and a positive interdependency that you never would have anticipated at the beginning.
• Because you’re not on Twitter, what you don’t realize is that Twitter is the back fence you share with your neighbors. Except your neighbors are people all over the world who share your interests and passions and can help you accomplish your personal and professional goals.
• Every day you have a chance to learn from these online neighbors.

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• if you want to be part of an extended learning network or community, you have to be findable. And you have to participate in some way. The people I learn from on a day-to-day basis are Googleable. They’re findable, they have a presence, they’re participating, they’re transparent. That’s what makes them a part of my learning network. If you’re not out there—if you’re not transparent or findable in that way—I can’t learn with you.