One-on-One with Teachers

Today I met with our Career Technical Education (CTE) teacher advisory groups from around the county. They were participating in a professional development day and had an hour to work in groups. I floated from group to group to talk about what they could do with videoconferencing.

It was very interesting. Most of them are interested in using VC, but there aren't any "ready made" programs in their area: marketing, business, advertising, computer graphic arts, building trades, public safety, firefighting, EMT, etc. So we talked about guest speakers. I asked them if you could bring any expert in your field to your teachers, who would it be? We made lists of ideas to work on.

We also talked about project connections with other classes. One of the more intriguing ideas we came up with is for the building trades class. We're talking about our class locally sharing a video clip of a field trip to an local historical building, interesting for its construction. Then we'd share that with another building trades class in a different area who was also studying about a local interesting building. We hope to make this happen in May. It's a morning class, so we'd need a partner school in EST or CST time zone. If any of you reading this blog have an interested class, send me an email. We'll probably be working out the details in April.

This confirms what I've been thinking this year about my local teachers use of videoconferencing. They know what VC is and what it can do, but they really need someone to talk to them one-on-one or in small subject area groups to assist them in selecting or creating a videoconference opportunity for their curriculum.