In response to several of our members, MACAE will be offering an excellent online learning and exploration session to help districts meet their professional development requirements for those who have an in-service on Dr. Martin Luther King Day, Monday, January 18th. This workshop, which will be available at five regional labs or in a webinar format from the comfort of your home or office, will overview professional development resources applicable to everyone who works in an educational program.

Whether you are an administrator needing staff management resources, a teacher honing your classroom effectiveness, or a facilities manager looking for scheduling tools, there is an amazing array of resources to help you improve your effectiveness. The following topics will be discussed at this workshop and each section will include an instructional segment, a hands-on activity, and reflective discussion afterwards to reinforce instructions and learn from other participants.

1. LearnPort: This professional development resource has a vast selection of courses and resources covering many topics of importance to community educators of all strands, from preschool to adult education to enrichment…and just about everything in between. Whether it’s what kind of cleaning products are safe for the allergen-sensitive to effective approaches for teaching algebra to struggling learners, to parent engagement, bullying, differentiated learning, etc. here are great tools available at your finger tips, and many are FREE!
   
   
2. Community Rooms: Learn how you can tap into MACAE’s Community Rooms on LearnPort to interact with your colleagues, conduct online collaborative meetings, and review documents together or learn how set up your own private community rooms for your staff, regional colleagues, etc.
   
   
3. netTrekker: Gain knowledge of this indispensible tool for finding curriculum and classroom resources for your students on just about any topic you can imagine. Once educators use netTrekker, they don’t know what they did without it.
   
   
4. Online Course Exploration: Experience what it actually takes to register and take an online course. If you haven’t yet gone online and spent time experiencing how online learning really works, you may inadvertently not open up opportunities for others to do so or may avoid helping colleagues and learners seek out available online classes that could help them meet their course requirements…or you might not realize how you could benefit both personally and professionally by taking an online class yourself, while saving travel time and gas money.
   
5. How to Most Effectively Facilitate Online Learning: There is now quite a lot of research and knowledge about how to most effectively facilitate online learning for students of all ages. Learn best and promising practices for delivering the online learning opportunities most conducive to helping students fully engage, complete and retain what they learn online.

You can register now for Get On Board with Online Learning!  Please note MACAE membership and group rate discounts. More information regarding specific computer lab sites will be forthcoming shortly. Make sure you register before the deadline of January 8!