Personalized PD: Finding webinars

As I spend a little time talking about personalized PD, it is only appropriate to share the concept of the webinar as a way to grow professionally.  Over the past few years, webinars have become one of the fastest ways of learning material and personalizing what is learned.  There is a lot of picking and choosing and a lot of options for many different content areas, grades and educators.

I have found several fantastic sites that offer PD webinars.  Some sites charge a fee to be a member, but they have free sessions from time to time. I do those free days like they are going out of style. My kids make fun of me because I am doing another webinar.  But, some of them are outstanding.   I have found a lot of good tools on the simplek12 website as well as edweb.net.   Both do webinars often and all of them have been great quality.  I have learned a lot of new things through both.

I have also found several archived unconferences with webinars too. (An unconference is a virtual conference where people all over the globe get together and go over various topics.  I have seen some through teacher2.0 and library2.0.  A few conferences have been archived, you just have to search for them.  They are all over the internet.

I recommend looking into these free webinars if you want to personalize PD for yourself.  It is very possible to customize what you want to learn.  I do a lot over the summer so when I go back to school I am fresh and ready to go.  I have taken a lot of information from these webinars and used them in my classroom, library and with colleagues.