Professional Development Meme

I found out that Martha Thornburgh has tagged me with the Professional Development Meme, but I didn't notice until more than a month afterward, which is sort of embarrassing. At least I've been goaded into starting a blog; it remains to be seen whether I am the kind of person that will benefit from a semi-public expression of thoughts enough to justify the time spent.

My time to work on these Professional Development goals is shorter than intended, but it still seems like a good thing.

The Rules for This Endeavor

1. Pick 3 professional development goals and commit to achieving them this summer.
2. For the purposes of this activity the end of summer will be Labor Day (09/01/08).
3. Post the above directions along with your 3 goals on your blog.
4. Title your post Professional Development Meme and link back/trackback to http://clifmims.com/blog/archives/353.
5. Use the following tag/ keyword/ category on your post: pdmeme.
6. Tag 8 others to participate in the meme.
7. Achieve your goals and "develop professionally."
8. Commit to sharing your results on your blog during early or mid-September.

The Goals

1. Finish reading Collapse, The World is Flat, Brain Rules and The Singularity is Near.
2. Incorporate the idea of the Digital Farm (from Alan November) into my class set up for the fall, and support the other chemistry teachers in doing the same thing.
3. Plan how I can help our staff effectively use a digital school calendar. This will mean (I hope) delineating some guidelines for use and providing a little training to staff.

Tagging

This part is hard. I notice that the originator had links to blogs for each of the people he tagged. The person who tagged me tagged 3 others without blogs. The people I know who have blogs, I don't know well enough to tag, and the people I know well enough to tag don't have blogs that I read, or can even find. So I don't have any links for the people I'm tagging:

• Missi Chalfant
• Heather Farren
• Sam Morrow
• Mike Thimgan
• Robert Coffey
• Anne Marie Morse
• Anya Keen
• Dave Woodward