Just say the words Professional Development around any teachers and most of the time you get a disgusted look and an explanation of wasted time.  I think everyone has seen a variation of this picture:

So the question needs to be asked how can we do professional development differently?

How can we make PD purposeful and curate information for others to learn from?

Social media is one tool that most schools have not completely determined how to harness the power.  But image if you could get credit for pinning best teaching practices in Pinterest, or Tweeting out your learning through Twitter, or posting to Facebook.

Our newest idea of Personalized PD allows us to do just that!

At Pickerington Schools we are going One2One with Chromebooks and all of our teachers are going through Google training.  During that training if teachers tweet, pin or post 64 times they can earn one hour of graduate credit.  Last January, we had 45 staff members take advantage of this during our PLSD Innovation Conference.  Check out our tweets from that conference at #PLSDU

The benefits of this type of Personalized PD are amazing.  The content the teacher posts is relevant to them, the content is curated and can be used in the future, the learning is shared throughout everyone as the content is public, easy way for the school to show off what teachers are learning and they are lifetime learners and that teachers see the power of social media in education.

As we are Going Google and Going One2One, we are offering two different courses for our teachers.  The first is the ability to find and read through 16 different Google Apps for Education articles and tweet, pin or post a summary of the learning.  The second is as teachers work through the Google Educator Certification they can tweet, pin or post 64 times about their learning.  Both of these will earn the teacher one graduate hour each.

What better way to gain credit then something that is relevant, personalized and impactful.  Plus your school gain a giant curation of tweets, pins and posts that can be used in many different ways!

For more information, check out Liberty Leadership.