Participants will become familiar with multiple models for educational technology professional development delivery/facilitation that will help them to design effective ETPD for the teachers whom they serve.

T V. Teachers use technology to enhance their productivity and professional practices.

Participants will be encouraged to use the taxonomy of ETPD approaches presented in the session to improve upon the matches between teachers' ETPD learning needs/preferences and the structures of ETPD activities.

T IV. Educational leaders provide direction to integrate technology tools into productive learning and administrative systems.

Administrator-level participants will be encouraged to use the multiple ETPD models presented, and the strategies shared to match these models with teachers' professional learning needs/preferences, to assist teacher educators at home with ETPD design and delivery.

Unfortunately, studies of K-12 teachers' instructional applications of educational technologies to date show many of the uses to be pedagogically unsophisticated, limited in breadth, variety, and depth, and not well integrated into curriculum-based teaching and learning (e.g., Cuban, 2001; Earle, 2002; McCrory-Wallace, 2004; Zhao, Pugh, Sheldon & Byers, 2002). As many studies and policy documents have concluded, the primary solution to this problem is to recommit to teachers’ professional learning about and with educational technologies. Yet perhaps our current difficulties with effective technology integration in K-12 classrooms have to do with the nature of educational technology professional development (ETPD) itself.

At the present time, teachers typically learn to integrate use of educational technologies in instruction in essentially five different ways:

1. Learning to operate particular software packages, paying little attention to serious consideration of how they can be used to address specific curriculum standards.
2. Seeing demonstrations of specific curriculum-related resources, lessons and/or project ideas.
3. Receiving prepackaged, top-down “training,” which is often designed to be delivered in a standardized way across many different schools.
4. Participating in more emergent, often grant-funded, special projects that seek to demonstrate the viability of educational reform through technology use. Funding for these programs rarely lasts longer than 1 - 3 years.
5. Taking university- or district-based courses, taught usually at the graduate level, either as part of a degree program or for recertification credit.

For the majority of teachers--with the possible exception of the ~15% who are innovators or early adopters relative to digital educational technologies--none of these approaches have worked very well in terms of sustainability, teacher ownership and/or re-invention, or application beyond the specific technology integration examples presented.

How might ETPD be improved? Drawing upon what we know about teacher learning and the diffusion of innovations, the design and delivery of both individual ETPD sessions and programs overall could be matched more intentionally and specifically with the needs, preferences, and contextual realities of the teachers it is designed to serve. To do this, the full range of possible ETPD models should be known, differentiating each by its practical affordances and constraints. The taxonomy that will be presented in this NECC 2007 session was created for this purpose.

Outline

1. Educational technology professional development: How well is it working to date? (~5 minutes)

2. What do we know about teacher learning and the diffusion of innovations that can guide the design of educational technology professional development efforts? (~10 minutes)

3. The ETPD Taxonomy: What are the different formats for/types of educational technology professional development? What are the affordances and constraints of each? (~20 minutes)

4. How is the ETPD taxonomy used to design PD for teachers? (Matching teachers' needs & preferences with logistical/contextual realities) (~10 minutes)

5. Combining/sequencing different ETPD models over time and across participants (~10 minutes)

6. Questions/discussion (~5 minutes)

Supporting Research

Cuban, L. (2001). Oversold and underused: Computers in classrooms. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Earle, R.S. (2002). The integration of instructional technology into public education: Promises and challenges. ET Magazine 42 (1), 5-13. Available: http://BooksToRead.com/etp/ .

McCrory Wallace, R. (2004). A framework for understanding teaching with the Internet. American Educational Research Journal, 41(2), 447-488.
 
Mishra, P., & Koehler, M. J. (2006). Technological pedagogical content knowledge: A new framework for teacher knowledge. Teachers College Record. Available: http://punya.educ.msu.edu/punyaweb/research/designaspedagogy/index.html

Papert, S. (1987). A critique of technocentrism in thinking about the school of the future. Available: http://www.papert.org/articles/ACritiqueofTechnocentrism.html

Zhao, Y., Pugh, K., Sheldon, S. & Byers, J.L. (2002). Conditions for classroom technology innovations. Teachers College Record, 104(3), 482-515.

Presenter Background

Judi Harris is a professor and the Pavey Family Chair in Educational Technology in the School of Education at the College of William & Mary in Virginia, where she coordinates the Curriculum and Educational Technology doctoral program. Dr. Harris’ research and service focus upon K-12 curriculum-based educational computing and teacher professional development. During the past 25 years of her work in educational computing, she has authored Way of the Ferret: Finding and Using Educational Resources on the Internet (1994 & 1995, ISTE), one of the first books about K-12 educational use of the Internet; Teaching and Learning with the Internet Facilitator’s Guide (1996, ASCD); Virtual Architecture: Designing and Directing Curriculum-Based Telecomputing (1998 & forthcoming, ISTE), used in many graduate educational technology and teacher preparation courses nationally; Design Tools for the Internet-Supported Classroom (1998, ASCD); Chefs, Not Cooks: Planning for Technology-Integrated Learning in Social Studies (forthcoming, Merrill/Prentice Hall); and more than 180 research and pedagogical articles on curriculum-based applications of educational technologies. She regularly presents featured speaker, keynote, and concurrent sessions at state, national, and international educational computing and research conferences. Her work is used by teachers, school technology specialists, and teacher educators; especially her “activity structures” method for designing curriculum-based learning activities that incorporate use of online tools and resources. Her nonprofit Electronic Emissary (http://emissary.wm.edu/) telementoring service and research effort, begun in 1992, is the longest-running K-12 effort of its kind, and has served students and teachers worldwide.

Prerequisites

Prior experience providing formal or informal educational technology professional development to teachers