Yahoo! Teachers Summer workshops

Derek Baird alerted me today via IM about the summer 2007 Yahoo! Teachers’ summer workshops. Currently they are scheduled to share sessions in Chicago, New York City, Manhattan (New York,) Austin, and San Diego. This is great news! Sessions are free and will be offered in July.

The unfortunate “release” (to use a nice word) of most of the Discovery Educator Network (DEN) field managers at the end of 2006 was a MAJOR setback in many school districts across the United States for the cause of helping teachers learn to appropriately integrate digital tools within learning contexts. Google Teacher Academies started to be offered in November 2006, but to date have just been shared on the west coast and east coast of the United States. I’m glad to see Yahoo! Teachers coming to Austin!

Hopefully we’ll see more Yahoo! Teachers workshops as well as Google Teacher Academies offered around the United States in the months to come. The DEN is continuing to march on as well, even though the field managers are still sorely missed. I met one of the 50 teachers selected to participate in a DEN National Institute offered as a Bahama cruise today! (Two Oklahoma educators were selected to participate.) Other DEN Institutes are being held in Maryland and California this summer.

It is exciting to see new educator professional development workshops like these being offered. Schools continue to purchase and receive lots of new technology TOOLS, but teachers in many areas (especially in rural communities) receive too few opportunities for cutting edge, digitally infused professional development. Face to face learning and relationship building is very important. Blended and online learning opportunities like K-12 Online are outstanding as well, however! (BTW, if you haven’t submitted a proposal for the 2007 K-12 Online Conference yet, you still have 2 weeks before the June 18th deadline!)

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