The new California Educators Together statewide community of practice platform is now in full implementation across the Golden State with 165,000+ educator account holders logging in to access digital collections of learning resources, join community groups of similar educators, and engage in professional learning programs being led by various California Department of Education funded initiatives.
Last week, one of the largest and longest running statewide Professional Development programs in California piloted their first, virtual Model Curriculum Institute within the new One Learning Platform using the integrated Digital PD Hub tools.
- With a unique history of convening hundreds of educators in both traditional and virtual/blended PD institute formats, the program helps focus cohorts of educators on improving instruction and increasing use of digital learning resources in a “lesson-study and design” format.
- To support this model, digital lesson authoring tools connect the program leadership officers and curriculum specialists to the participating educators to guide and document their growth with the strategies they are learning.
Beyond the initial web-based, two day workshop…the teams engage using the Digital PD Hub tools for two months of online coordination and collaboration on their targeted lesson plans until the project concludes. Once finalized, those lessons that served as direct evidence of the participants’ skill development, then get collectively published to a directory of what now represents thousands of lessons for use by other educators across the state.
The One Learning Platform provides this popular PD program, and a growing number of new California PD programs, the tools to fully initiate, conduct, support, and complete these high-quality professional learning experiences all within the system.
With custom micro-repositories to manage their project resources for their participants and facilitator-coaches, communication tools to organize timelines and virtual meetings, and specific curriculum authoring tools that allow educators to directly integrate some of the top, national OER collections into their work-products, we are happy to support these types of innovative and model professional learning experiences both within and outside of California.
One Learning Community is excited to coordinate with key statewide partners to maximize their outreach and collaboration efforts in these ways and is in the midst of launching similar programs using this model with teams from other states over the next 6 months!
Don’t hesitate to reach out to us for a “backstage tour” of how these programs are operating in our platform and to get more detailed information.
