As part of my professional life as a state-certified educator, I’m required to participate in ongoing professional development. For as long as I’ve been an educator, the requirement has been for me to earn 150 clock hours every five years. To earn clock hours, I have to pay to take classes that are qualified to grant me the hours. Interestingly, in the last month the requirement was reduced to 100 clock hours earned every five years.

It used to be that to earn clock hours I had to be in classes. So back in the early days of PSCS, I spent part of my summers sitting in classes at places like the University of Washington. Over the last 10-15 years, with the growth of the Internet, I’ve been able to take classes online. Some of these allow me to adapt the class to my purposes, which ends up being so much more convenient.

For instance, I just completed an online class on the importance of bringing compassion to the classroom. Obviously, that’s a subject near and dear to me, one of which I have a fair amount of experience. I chatted with the teacher of the class about my experience in the subject and he agreed to let me adapt some of the work I’ve done for the Compassion Games into a curriculum designed for elementary school students.

If you are interested, you can find my final project here.