Logging on to Staff Development: Enhancing Your Teachers' Knowledge and Use of Educational Technology through Online Professional Development

A growing body of research indicates that information and communication technologies make teachers' lessons more interesting, more enjoyable, and more important to their students (Margaret J. Cox, "The Effects of Attitudes, Pedagogical Practices, and Teachers' Roles on the Incorporation of ICT into the School Curriculum," Information and Communication Technology and the Teacher of the Future, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003). Specifically, the use of computers in a classroom can accommodate students' individual rates of learning and development, which in turn helps learners become proficient at accessing, evaluating, and communicating information. These technological learning resources will not be fully available to students, however, unless teachers are well-versed in ways to incorporate them into the classroom curriculum. The value of integrating technology into class curriculum is emphasized in Title II-D of the No Child Left Behind Act, which calls for the combining of technology resources and systems with educator training and curriculum development to fulfill the primary goal of enhancing learning and increasing student achievement. A secondary goal of this federal initiative is to cross the digital divide by ensuring that all students are technologically literate by the end of eighth grade (Quick Key No. 3: Understanding the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001: Technology Integration, North Central Regional Educational Laboratory, 2002, www.ncrel.org/tech/qkey3/qktech.pdf). State Mandate for Educational Technology Mobile County Public School System in Alabama is one of the 100 largest school districts in the United States. The district, which is composed of urban, suburban, and rural areas, covers an entire county (encompassing more than 1,238 square miles) and serves 103 schools with more than 65,000 students. Given the geographic scope and diversity of the district, providing professional development to its educators presents several challenges, including encouraging all teachers to participate, ensuring uniformity in the training content, and acquiring funding. Fortunately, the district's funding challenge was resolved in 2002-2003 when the Alabama Department of Education awarded Mobile County Public School System $441,293 via an Enhancing Education Through Technology (EETT) federal grant. While the funds were designated for improving student academic success, including technology literacy, the money also had to be used to improve the capacity of the district's teachers to integrate technology effectively into curriculum and instruction. In fact, all EETT recipients must comply with a mandate to use at least 25 percent of the funds to provide "ongoing, sustained, and intensive high-quality professional development" for their teachers ("Enhancing Education Through Technology Awards" news release, Alabama Department of Education, 2004). The district's EETT grant proposal was based on benchmarks located in the district's technology plan. Those benchmarks were based on the goals cited in the state's IMPACT (Indicators for Measuring Progress in Advancing Classroom Technology) plan, which has six main goals: 1. Encourage learning that is relevant and authentic through the use of technology. 2. Align technology with local, state, and national content standards and curricula to enhance learning and enrich teaching. 3. Provide professional development that enables staff to become and remain proficient in the use of technology to improve learning. 4. Cultivate lifelong learning communities in which the tools of technology support knowledge. 5. Give every learner the technological tools to access and process information. 6. Fund technical support, maintenance, and emerging technologies to improve learning. While the benchmarks in Mobile County's technology plan focus mainly on the first four goals, some do cover the remaining two goals. …