Participate.com: Your professional learning toolbelt

The many, many years of formal professional development I’ve attended over many, many years in K12 education in no way equal the professional development opportunities I found for myself in the last few years across my online communities of practice and through open structure conferences that offered me choices and flexibility.

Participate.com allows us to pull all of this goodness together for ourselves and for the learning communities we serve.

https://youtu.be/hKWIuzXE850

Way back in 2016 I wrote a post about Participate.com, Curating with Communities. It was definitely time for a revisit.

A recent winner of the ISTE Seal of Alignment Report, Participate.com is a professional learning networker’s dream, packed with features offering local relevance as well as the potential for global connections.

The ISTE Report shared the importance of educators retooling their own learning experiences:

Technology has made our world more interconnected than ever, which is why students must learn how to use digital tools in appropriate ways. Before we can develop students’ digital literacy, we must first equip teachers with the tools they need to create authentic learning experiences in their classrooms.

Designed to connect educators in active, collaborative environments, the Participate platform offers a realm of options that include opportunities to build and join communities, develop or be part of existing professional development courses (many with the option of microcredentials), the ability to collaboratively curate resources in collections, opportunities to participate in Twitter chats and much more.

Participate’s Director of Education Strategy, Dr. Jennifer Williams, shares that the goal is to be the glue, pulling together the array of possible professional development options–edCamps, Twitter chats, workshops, conferences, PLN sharing, and more–into one uniform experience.

The tabs on the redesigned dashboard represent the realm of learning opportunities.

 

Let’s take a deeper dive into a few of those opportunities.

Collections

Librarians and classroom teacher partners will appreciate the updated Collections feature.  Searchable or browsable by tags, grade level and subject area, Collections allow users to collaboratively curate, organize and share resources–apps, lesson plans, handouts, websites, documents, presentations, videos, etc. Collections support flipped and personal learning, the creation of learning playlists, safari challenges, the sharing of professional development materials, and planning with our PLNs , our grade-level and departmental teams.

Jennifer Williams shared this comparison and summary of the updates relating to interface, sharing, privacy, tagging, subscribing and collaborating :

• Updated interface for more intuitive curation.
• Expanded permissions capabilities. Now you can control who is a contributor, commenter or viewer.
• Easily add more than one collaborator at a time to a collection.
• Subscribe to any public collection so you can see when comments or new resources are added.
• Quickly find what you need though new search, filter and sort functionality.