Why "Teacher Professional Development Australia"?
My journey in professional development and why I created Teacher Professional Development Australia.
The backstory
Early in my teaching career, I was on a regular quest to find effective ways to engage students. Despite limited technology resources – confined mostly to laptop banks and dysfunctional computer rooms (I know many of you likely didn’t even have these!) – I experimented with various approaches, tech tools, apps, and websites.
As my unconventional methods caught the interest of colleagues, informal discussions turned into presentations at faculty and staff meetings. Eventually, I found myself leading professional development sessions for teachers in our local network.
In 2017, I collaborated with Teacher Training Australia to create my first formal course, "Productive Teaching with Google Apps for Education." Starting as face-to-face sessions, the course later transitioned to an online format. The success of this course paved the way for others like "Google Classroom for Beginners," "Google Classroom: The Next Steps," and "Beyond PowerPoint: Creating Truly Interactive Presentations."
By 2020, these courses had reached hundreds of educators in NSW and Australia, providing valuable professional development hours and crucial support to teachers transitioning to online learning:
But by this time, NESA started to make important changes around the way accredited professional development would look, requiring a more detailed application process and new course design aligned with four “priority areas”.
So, I started out on my own…
The courses I had developed were mainly focused on how teachers could use ICTs to improve engagement, plan for effective teaching and learning more easily, obtain useful student data, differentiate learning, connect with parents and community among many other benefits. I realised that these strategies were not really about ICTs at all, but about pedagogy. So, I embarked on creating Teacher Professional Development Australia to create new courses aligned around curriculum rather than purely being about “how-tos” for ICTs. The goal was simple – to provide curriculum-focused professional development that builds engagement and leads to effective teaching and learning.
What to expect?
A semi-regular newsletter here sharing some tips, tricks or ideas that I’ve come across with occasional information about existing or upcoming courses or resource packs or helpful templates.
What else?
This newsletter is just one way to stay engaged with what we’re doing, you can also follow us on social media at Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.