Professional development 2014-2015

During the past school year me and my students did a lot of collaboration with school classes from abroad (United States, Surinam, Curacao, Czech Republic and Saudi Arabia) using tech tools as SMART Bridgit and Skype. I was at BETT 2014 in London, UK and met a few SEEs from Canada, Spain, the UK and Finland and did a few sessions at the SMART Collaborative Classroom and did a session about the use of social media in the classroom at the biggest social media and education summit in Amsterdam. I went on a study trip 'Finland Calling' to Helsinki, Finland from September 22nd till 28th 2013 with the headmaster of my school to have a closer look at the Finnish education system and to gain more about differentiation in the classroom. And from december 2013 my classroom was transformed into a SMART Collaborative Classroom and I have tried a lot new ways to engage students more to cooperate and collaborate with each other whilst using the SMART Boards. I also want to focus on BYOD for students, because since a few months our school has WiFi for all students and will start with BYOD next school year.

Inside my SMART Collaborative Classroom I want more student engagement whilst the use of their own devices such as laptops, smartphones and tablets and really want SMARTamp to get going. I'm quite familiar with SMARTamp and will learn a lot more during the Global SEE Summit in Calgary, Canada which should be the best PD thing for teachers ever. Will share more about this one later.

Because SMARTamp is connected to the Google accounts and as inspired by some other SMART Exemplary Educators from the US, I want to do some Google training. At first an online training to become a Google Educator and later in November I want to attent the Google Teacher Academy in Amsterdam to become a Google Certified Teacher as well.

During the next school year I'm looking forward to join a Learning Circle from the Global Teenager Project again with my 'world citizenship'-classes and cooperate and collaborate with other classes from around the globe. Perhaps we could even visit another school as an expedition in another country next school year.

And at last I want to try this Peer Scholar thing, which should be pretty cool to use in my classes. Let the summer begin and I will share more about professional development on this blog ...

SMART Collaborative Classroom from the past school year