Anytime, Anywhere After recently writing about Ditch Summit and after having time to try out Microsoft Education a bit more, I want to share about some professional development and online certification opportunities that can be done anytime and anywhere. I know I've already mentioned how to become Flipgrid Certified, which might have actually been my first online certification with educational technology. I know that several other educational technology platforms/softwares/etc. have similar certifications. (Side note - some of those cost money, and personally I feel like they should all be free. Now I realize some of them are only $10, but educators are already buying PD books, school supplies, etc. out of our own pockets. Plus if educators like your product and see it positively impacting their students, they'll spread the word to other teachers. Why charge a fee? Needless to say, I stick to the free ones.)
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One of the educational technology tools I heard the most about this summer has been Flipgrid. I'd been meaning to check it out, and ISTE finally gave me the final push to sign up for a free version account.
Then, as chance would have it during ISTE, Matt Frattali Periscoped Jennifer Casa-Todd's talk on her Social Leadia book (which sounds amazing), which led me to Matt's Twitter and serendipitously to Vedchat, which he founded. I jumped at the chance to try out Flipgrid from the contributor's/student's end and responded to their week 9 post about ISTE reflections, and I've also responded to their week 10 post about Educational Leadership. (You can check out the current topic by going to www.vedchat.com.) When I first got ready to record my response for week 9, I had at least 4 redos until I was okay with it. I absolutely hate being filmed! But then the Vedchat community encouraged me to not overthink my posts, to just film once, and to add my Twitter handle as my name so we could follow each other. Genius! It's hard to not be overly critical of our own responses, but we need to remind ourselves that we are our own worst critics, and other people care more about our ideas and our contributing than they do about if we stumble over a word or took too long of a pause. |