Professional Development is a wonderful thing. A place where two teachers, group of colleagues, educators across the lands can collaborate and communicate about what is working, tried and true tactics that have made their classroom successful. It’s also a place where challenges can be shared and resolutions can be found. And in our perfect world we can take time off of school to attend these fabulous conferences, our districts will foot the bill for the entire excursion, and it always works with our schedule.

With demanding a curriculum, other professional commitments and your family, getting time a way to learn and grow professionally might be a challenge. I urge you to enter the world of webinars. Best of all most are FREE!

What is a webinar? It is a seminar connected over the internet. They are presented live by experts in the field. You have the opportunity to participate by typing a question in the chat window/back channel or speaking using the microphone on your computer or phone. Would you rather just listen, that is fine as well. They occur at all different times of the day, however if you are unable to attend the session you want on the “live” time, most are recorded and can be found on the company’s website or You Tube channel.

Which ones should you watch? This is as personal as it gets. Choose a topic, company or person that you are interested in and find out if/when they have webinars via searches.

Some personal favorites:

• SMART’s Heather Lamb’s Digital Dashboard
• PBS on a variety of topics
• VSTE (Virginia Society for Technology in Education) be sure to check on your state’s technology departments)
• Scholastic – or check out your favorite educational companies
• Tech Learning
• Discovery Learning
• Teq