Professional Learning

These Web sites provide many types of professional learning resources for K-12 teachers, from online courses to video clips to research articles.

PBS TeacherLine offers professional learning courses online to individual PreK-12 teachers and districts. Offerings include courses in mathematics, reading/English language arts, science, instructional technology, and instructional strategies. There is a fee for courses, and participants earn college credit, PDPs, or CEUs.

The Wisconsin Academy Staff Development Initiative (WASDI) provides professional learning for teachers throughout Wisconsin in summer institutes throughout the state.

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills provides a framework for 21st century learning that is being adopted by many states, including Wisconsin.

Learner.org from the Annenberg Foundation provides multimedia resources to help teachers increase expertise in their fields and improve teaching methods.

Pedagogy in Action from the Science Education Resource Center (SERC) at Carleton College provides a library of information about teaching methods. Methods include ooperative learning, game-based learning, role-playing, Socratic questioning, teaching with data, and many more.

The Intel® Teach Program provides resources focusing on using technology to improve teaching. The K-12 Teaching Resources section includes tools and strategies for developing technology-supported units as well as stories from teachers around the world. The K-12 Teaching Tools section includes tools to help create assessments that address 21st century skills and strategies.

The Apple Learning Interchange provides media and ideas for classroom activities. Educators can connect with each other, search for projects, or collaboratively publish materials.

Tapped In from SRI International’s Center for Technology in Learning is an online learning environment for K-12 teachers, librarians, administrators, professional development staff, and researchers.

The Into the Book Teacher Area provides lots of professional learning resources for teaching reading comprehension strategies.

The Reading Rockets site offers infor-mation and resources on how kids learn to read, why so many struggle, and how caring adults can help.

The Math Forum from Drexel University is an online resource for improving math teaching and learning.

Access Excellence offers health, biology and life science teachers access to practicing scientists and critical sources of new scientific information.

The Wisconsin Historical Society’s Teachers’ and Students’ Portal provides professional learning resources including digital collections, activities and workshops.

The Library of Congress Teachers’ page features resources including the Teaching with Primary Sources Program and Webcasts for teachers.

The Arts for Learning Web site provides a searchable database of arts programs and resources for teaching and learning.

How To’s from the Kennedy Center’s ArtsEdge site offers short articles on teaching the arts across the curriculum.

Learning Through Art from the Guggenheim Museum focuses on using the inquiry process to promote critical-thinking, art, and literacy skills in students.

CyberTeach from the EconEdLinks site provides professional learning resources for the teaching of economics. The site includes a section that lists state standards and provides lesson plans correlated to each standard.

The LD Online Educators area supplies resources and instructional strategies for teaching students with learning disabilities or ADHD.

From Now On: The Educational Technology Journal contains several professional learning guides by educational technology and engaged learning expert, Jamie McKenzie.

MiddleWeb: Exploring Middle School Reform is full of resources specifically for middle school teachers.

TeacherTube is an online community for sharing instructional videos. The site aims to provide anytime, anywhere professional learning with teachers teaching teachers. This site contains a lot of advertising.

This site from the University of California-Berkeley features videos and podcasts of UC Berkeley courses. Brush up on your subject area by attending UC Berkeley lectures from the comfort of your home or school. An excellent starting place for pro-fessional learning resources is your professional organization’s web site.

Highlights for High School from MIT's OpenCourseWare site provides resources to improve science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) instruction at the high school level. The site includes more than 2,600 video and audio clips, animations, lecture notes and assignments taken from actual MIT courses, and categorizes them to match the Advanced Placement physics, biology and calculus curricula.

The Teacher to Teacher Initiatvie initiative sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education supports teachers' efforts in the classroom through professional learning workshops and eLearning and by sharing relevant information through email updates. The Teacher Workshops page includes slides and handouts on teaching a whole variety of subjects.

Classroom Learning 2.0 is an online tutorial for educators to learn more about YouTube, podcasts, image generators, wikis, mashups and other web 2.0 tools. This free tutorial by the California School Library Association 2.0 Team takes you step by step through the use of many of these tools.