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Brief Summary of Contents of Week # 2

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Staff Development. What staff development is needed to achieve the goal of substantially increasing the integration of ICT into curriculum, instruction, and assessment? An introduction to staff development, with an emphasis on one-on-one staff development. We will also briefly discuss two three topics that are closely related to staff development: 1) Needs Assessment; 2) Future of ICT in education; and 3) Long-Range Strategic Planning

Some Specific Objectives and Topics for Week # 2

Objectives

  1. Review three key aspects of getting ready to do staff development:
    • Needs Assessment;
    • Future of ICT in education; and
    • Long-Range Strategic Planning
  2. Provide a solid introduction to Staff Development with an emphasis on:
    • Small and large group staff development.
    • One-one-one staff development.
    • Just in time staff development.
    • Staff development done by role modeling in a teacher's classroom.
  3. Formative, summative, and residual impact evaluation of staff development. Keep in mind that the goal is changes in teacher behavior that lead to better education for students and improved professional life for teachers.

Topics

  1. Research strongly supports the need for highly qualified teachers. Good teachers continually learn--they build capacity through Action Research, careful analysis of their performance and the results they achieve, formal and informal education, and striving to do well.
  2. The ICT knowledge and skills of the average teacher are woefully inadequate for making effective use of ICT facilities available to themselves and their students, in helping their students to get a better education
  3. There are a variety of approaches to determining the ICT staff development needs of teachers in a school. These include informal and formal observations, use of assessment instruments, and self assessment by the teachers, However, one also draws on whatever Long-range Strategic Planning has been done by the school and district, school improvement plans, and insights into the future of ICT in education.
  4. Staff development is most effective when it is relevant to the needs and interests of the teachers (think about motivation) and in situations where the teachers will make immediate use of the ideas and materials being covered.
  5. It takes a concerted and long term effort to significantly change a teacher's curriculum, instruction, assessment, and other professional activity.
  6. Click here for some notes developed on staff development in last year's version of the DAE2 course.
  7. Click here for the slides of a 1992 talk that Dave Moursund gave on the future of computers in education. Examine this talk from a point of view of successes and failures in long-range forecasting.

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Staff Development

In very brief summary, some of the points to be covered on this topic include e topic include:

  1. Professional development for IT in education is a major problem. Our educational system was not designed to deal with the pace of change and the potential magnitude of change that IT brings to education. However, this problem exists even without IT. The pace of progress in educational research overwhelms the implementation abilities of our educational system.
  2. For a number of years, guidelines from many sources have suggested that schools need to be spending 30% of all of their IT in education resources on PD. One example of this sort of guideline is found in the Computer Literacy Challenge Fund grants that Oregon awards using federal money. A guideline in the RFP for these grants is that at least 30% of the funds must be used for PD. This 30% figure seems to be a relatively arbitrary rule of thumb. Research suggests that in the US in the late 1990s, the actual level of expenditures for IT-oriented professional development was in the range of 15%. What we actually need is a better measure of how much; professional development is needed to support effective integration of IT into the curriculum , and then good measure so what this costs. That would provide a basis for decision making on how to divide IT funds amount things like:
    • Hardware
    • Software
    • Materials
    • Curriculum, instruction, and assessment redesign
    • Technical support for teachers and students
    • Professional development
  3. There is a lot known about how to organize and run effective PD. By and large, actual PD for IT in education tends to violate much of what we know is effective. That is, PD is a relatively well developed component of SoTL. However, actual implementation tends to not take advantage of what we know about ways to design and implement effective inservice. This is true both in IT-related professional development and in non IT-oriented professional development.
  4. Standards for what teachers should know and be able to do (and actually do) are not well established. ISTE has a large federally funded project to develop such standards for preservice teachers. The ISTE National Educational Technology Standards for Teachers (NETS for Teachers) can be accessed at http://cnets.iste.org. Although these are standards for preservice teachers, they serve as a good starting point for specifying standards for inservice teachers. Some states are adopting the ISTE NETS for (preservice) teachers as their standards for inservice teachers.

Just in time inservice, one-on-one inservice, informal inservice, and other "personal" approaches are highly effective. Each individual teacher can be of help to his/her fellow teachers in professional development. One model of PD for a school is that each teacher has PD responsibilities (in areas of their own expertise). Thus, each teacher is responsible for developing and maintaining a level of expertise in some area of general interest to other staff, and helping the staff to learn that area.

Whole Class Exercise: Share some examples in which you informally or formally have helped an adult learn some IT. What works and what does not work in this informal adult education type of situation? How is it applicable to professional development of teachers?

Debrief: If we reframe this as "Just in time education." we can better understand the importance and potential for such a one-on-one approach to professional development. Referring back to Bloom's study, we see the power of individual tutoring coming into play. Since the one-on-one intervention tends to focus on a topic in which the learner really wants to learn, there tends to be a high level of intrinsic motivation. By and large, one-on-one inservice education in IT is highly effective.

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The Future of Computers in Education (July 1992)

The contents of the "overhead projector slides" for this hour-length talk are given below.

Slide 1: Title

The Past, Present, and Future of Computer-related Technology in Education:

The Best is Yet to Come

 

Slide 2

Dave Moursund

Executive Officer

International Society for Technology in Education

Professor

University of Oregon

 

1787 Agate Street

Eugene, Oregon 97403

 

Work Phone: (503) 346-4414

Home Phone: (503) 344-3347

Fax: (503) 346-5890

Internet: Moursund@Oregon.UOregon.Edu

Bitnet: Moursund@Oregon

 

Slide 3

Part 1: Introduction

 

We know that change has been occurring.

 

 

Slide 4

We know that the totality of human knowledge is growing rapidly.

 

 

Slide 5

We know that the future is difficult to predict.

 

 

 

Slide 6

Part 2: Powerful Technologies

1. The automobile is an example of a "powerful technology."

2. A powerful technology, such as the automobile, can have a very long life time.

3. A powerful technology that is widely adopted produces far reaching changes.

4. In retrospect, it is clear that automobile technology has had a major impact on our schools and society.

5. It requires relatively good and careful thinking to "see" clearly into the future as one analyzes a powerful technology.

 

Slide 7

Computers are a powerful technology.

The history of the development of computers has been relatively well documented.

Living histories have been collected.

Recently the Association for Computing Machinery helped develop a five-part video that is really good.

As we look at some of that video, try to imagine being there at the time of the developments being shown.

 

Slide 8

Part 3: The Present

It is not easy to "really know" the present--there is so much going on.

This leads to narrow specialization in areas where people are trying to do leading edge research.

It also creates a major problem for education.

 

Slide 9

Part 4: The Future

Some approaches to predicting the future.

  1. Wishful thinking: Imagine how you would like the future to be, and forecast that it will be that way.
  2. Historical: Forecast by analogy with the past.
  3. Delphi techniques: Facilitate knowledgeable people to work cooperatively toward developing forecasts.
  4. Mathematics: Gather data representing past and present, and extrapolate into the future.
  5. Megatrends: Identify major current trends and forecast that they will continue.

 

Slides 10-12

Part 5: Megatrends in Computer-Related Technology in Education

Summary: There will be continued rapid progress in improving student and teacher access to technology to support learning and teaching.

  1. Distance education will increase rapidly.
  2. In the area of telecommunications and electronic networking we will see major increases in:
    1. Telecommunication
    2. Administrative support systems
    3. Students and teachers being part of a Global Village
  3. In the area of computer-integrated instruction &endash; computer as tool to aid in problem solving &endash; we will see continued increase in use of a balanced variety of:
    1. Learner-centered tools (tools, requiring some programming skills)
    2. Subject-based tools in each discipline
    3. Generic tools such as word processor, databases, graphics
  4. Integrated learning systems (computer-assisted learning) will become a routine part of the instructional delivery system.
  5. We will see continuing movement toward merger of the integrated learning system and the computer-integrated instruction ideas.
  6. Multimedia, and hyper-multimedia will have an increasing impact on the content and pedagogy of education. Students will increasingly be expected to be multimedia literate.
  7. We will see artificial intelligence, and especially expert systems, having an increasing impact on the content and pedagogy of education.
    1. Voice input systems
    2. Intelligent Computer-Assisted Instruction systems
    3. Intelligent job performance aids
  8. Teacher training programs will (quite likely) continue to lag behind in preparing teachers to move into computer-rich learning/teaching environments.
  9. There will be a gradual change in the roles that classroom teachers play in the overall instructional delivery system. (Teacher as facilitator--as "guide on the side.")

 

Slide 13

Part 6: Mega-megatrends

  1. The idea of the Accumulated Knowledge of the human race. One solves problems by building on previous work of oneself and others.
    • More and more knowledge will be stored in electronic form.
    • The computer will become more and more useful in helping one to make use of accumulated knowledge.
  2. The idea of use of aids to communication.
    • Hypermedia in its broadest sense is "merely" an extension of reading and writing, speaking and listening, and math.
    • Hypermedia, tied in with global telecommunications and lots of compute power, is the leading edge of a mega-megatrend.

     

Slide 14

Part 7: Conclusion

  1. Using a variety of techniques, we can forecast the future of computer-related technology in education well enough to be of considerable value to current decision makers.
  2. Everything that has been implemented so far in the field of computers in education is, in total, a modest fraction of what will transpire over the next fifty years.
  3. Recommendations:
    • Think globally--act locally.
    • Think long term--act now.

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