EDTC 6433 Teaching with Technology ISTE Standard 5: Engage in Professional Growth and Leadership

EDTC 6433 Teaching with Technology ISTE Standard 5: Engage in Professional Growth and Leadership

I am constantly striving to improve my instructional practice.  I am looking for professional development that I find useful and easy to implement into my classroom.  When I started researching my question, “how can I demonstrate the effective use of digital tools and resources as a department head to foster the growth of my departments professional learning communities and as a whole department?” I thought of professional development.  As a department head I am always looking for ways to help my staff grow and learn in their teaching practices.  The article I found, Moving education into the digital age: the contribution of teachers’ professional development, talked about how to design professional development to be meaningful for teachers.  The article stated that, “teachers (and learning) are often treated so generically that resulting TPD is not experienced as relevant” (Twining, Raffaghelli, Albion, & Knezek, 2013) where TPD stands for teacher professional development.  I am looking for ways to help make professional development opportunities relevant and worthwhile. 

As I continued my research, I was reading through the class readings.  I read an article titled, Early-adopting science teachers’ perceptions and use of a wiki to support professional development.  This article talks about using wiki to support professional development by helping teachers collaborate and work together even when time is limited.  This give teachers who normally have no face to face time with colleagues a way to support each other and work together.  The article mentioned that “All six teachers made comments about the need to take the time to become familiar with a new technology like the wiki and to think about how it might be used.” (Donnelly & Boniface, 2013)  Although I find this to be a cool study and I think it is valuable to give teachers time to support each other, I worry about the time it would take to become proficient at it.  This to the PD problem we are having in our department.  Everything takes time.  How are we going to make PD more worthwhile for teachers so it seems like an extension of what they are doing instead of extra work?

One of my classmates, Alex, found an article that is similar to the one in the class readings about professional development.  In the article, Factors of Participants and Blogs that Predict Blogging Activeness During Teaching Practice and Induction Year, the authors talk about using blogs to help with professional development and collaboration.  Like above, I would love to incorporate this into my department as another way we can support each other but I don’t know how to tackle the technology fears.  Throughout my research around my triggering question, I have found many resources like the article listed above, that give me ideas of how to better support and collaborate with my colleagues in my department.  I am still left with many questions.  I am still wondering how to make professional development around technology meaningful, worthwhile, and accessible for all?  I am going to continue looking for ways to bring technology into my departmental professional development to help advance not only myself and my colleagues but our students.

  

References

• ·         Donnelly, D. F., & Boniface, S. (2013, April 21). Consuming and creating: Early-adopting science teachers’ perceptions and use of a wiki to support professional development. Computers and Education. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2013.04.023
• ·         Luik, P., & Taimalu, M. (2016). Factors of Participants and Blogs that Predict Blogging Activeness During Teaching Practice and Induction Year. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 17(1). doi:10.19173/irrodl.v17i1.2169
• ·         Twining, P., Raffaghelli, J., Albion, P., & Knezek, D. (2013, August 5). Moving Education into the Digital Age: The Contribution of Teachers' Professional Development. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 29(5), 426-437. doi:10.1111/jcal.12031