Technology Staff Development

Two of the needs identified by the Star Chart were educator preparation and development as well as teaching and learning. One reason may be that there hasn’t been enough time and thought devoted to professional development planning that focuses on the use and integration of technology in curriculum instruction and assessment. This training will begin to address this need. This will be a half day training at the beginning of the school year facilitated by the technology specialist. The training will start with the technology specialist selecting two or three programs that are particularly useful and demonstrate how they can be utilized in the classroom. After that, several groups will meet together by departments.

Teachers will bring the curriculum guide for their content area. Each subject area will meet in a different location containing web-connected computers. By the end of the training grade level teams will have utilized their collective power to develop resources for more student-centered lessons that incorporate the use of technology.
Each grade-level team will determine who on their team will research:
1. Websites for teachers, which would be useful for planning purposes;
2. Websites for students, which would be useful for research;
3. Programs to extend student learning (i.e. podcasts, publisher provided resources).
Using the computer, each person will locate and examine websites/programs/resources for its usefulness to integrate into the curriculum. Each person will focus on sites that can be utilized in the first six weeks of school. They will need to focus on the content prescribed by curriculum documents. After an hour to an hour and a half, the teams will come back together to discuss what they found and how it can be used by the team.

To promote continued utilization of technology and assess the training, the professional learning communities will set aside time each six weeks to revisit technology integration. During this time, the group will focus on two questions:
1. Which of the resources were used; and
2. Were there any new resourced identified?