As the Principal Investigator for the Elon Noyce Scholars Program I have access to some great supplementary professional development opportunities. I was just able to take advantage of one such opportunity after I applied for and was selected to participate in one of the Shodor Foundation's workshops for Noyce participants in Dublin, Ireland.
After an overnight flight to Dublin during which my sleeping habits were noted by a few colleagues,
I had the chance to spend five days in Dublin with a group of other Noyce PIs and some of Shodor's staff. The opportunity to meet the other Noyce program PIs was a nice side benefit to the experience as we had chances to exchange ideas about our program's opportunities and challenges. We had an enjoyable slate of cultural activities as well. I promise none of these cultural activities involved NSF funds paying for my Guinness - we even returned today, just before St. Patrick's Day!
The meat of our program was our participation in a joint workshop at Dublin City College with European teacher educators focused on inquiry-based science education. Our European counterparts were mostly Irish, although we did have a Welshman in the mix. Shodor's Dr. Bob Panoff led the workshop, which included information on many of the helpful tools created by Shodor. The other Noyce PIs and I found the resources we learned about to be impressive, and I was tweeting and e-mailing links from the workshop back to my STEM teacher education colleagues in the US. In particular, I thought the Interactivate tools looked quite powerful. It was also beneficial to meet and collaborate with our European colleagues during our time in Ireland, and learn about different STEM and teacher education initiatives underway there.
At Elon we are fortunate because Shodor is just down the road from us in Durham, so we'll be able to bring Bob to our institution soon to share their resources with more of our faculty and teacher education students. We'll also encourage our Noyce participants to apply for future opportunities to participate in Shodor programming.
After an overnight flight to Dublin during which my sleeping habits were noted by a few colleagues,
The meat of our program was our participation in a joint workshop at Dublin City College with European teacher educators focused on inquiry-based science education. Our European counterparts were mostly Irish, although we did have a Welshman in the mix. Shodor's Dr. Bob Panoff led the workshop, which included information on many of the helpful tools created by Shodor. The other Noyce PIs and I found the resources we learned about to be impressive, and I was tweeting and e-mailing links from the workshop back to my STEM teacher education colleagues in the US. In particular, I thought the Interactivate tools looked quite powerful. It was also beneficial to meet and collaborate with our European colleagues during our time in Ireland, and learn about different STEM and teacher education initiatives underway there.
At Elon we are fortunate because Shodor is just down the road from us in Durham, so we'll be able to bring Bob to our institution soon to share their resources with more of our faculty and teacher education students. We'll also encourage our Noyce participants to apply for future opportunities to participate in Shodor programming.
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