RTEC Exchange

Professional Development

Return to

TechPlan Toolkit

Archived Information Only - This site will not be updated.

The objective of professional development is increased teacher competency and student achievement. Professional development requires substantial time and resources on an ongoing basis. Here are tools to assist you to plan, monitor and assess the level of technology use by administrators, teachers and students.

Professional Development in Technology: Key Principles and Professional Development in Technology: Strategies and Examples
Describes the key research based principles that you will need to consider as you develop your professional development plan and provides concrete strategies and examples of the principles in action.

Professional Development Checklist -will help you to evaluate your planned professional development activities to ensure that you get a return for your investment of time and money.

A Model for Staff Development – Reviews strategies for planning professional development including; incentives, participant responsibility, training scenarios, follow-up and audience.

Technology Planning Checklist is a teacher survey that gives planners data to establish the extent to which technology is currently being used in the classroom and to determine the future needs of teachers.

Resources

	CEO Forum
	Professional Development: A Link to Better Learning Year 2 Report and the Teacher Preparation STAR Chart are resources published by the CEO Forum. The forum identified as critical to the process of teaching and learning: hardware, content, connectivity, and professional development.

	Educational AT Training Resources
	This site at the Alliance for Technology Access is sponsored by WestEd RTEC and lists national sources of on-site training and distance learning in the field of AT as it relates to K-12 education. Success! Teacher Training shows how one district developed expertise to meet the legal requirements of IDEA.

	Instructional Resource Team Model
	A Model of Professional Development.A resource team is assigned to each site to focus instruction on the building goals. This team is made up of an instructional coordinator, a learning technologies facilitator, assistive technology facilitator and, in the elementary schools, a gifted resource teacher.

	NETS Standards for Teachers
	The NETS standards represent a national consensus on what teachers should know about and be able to do with technology.

	Results-Based Staff Development for the Middle Grades
	Identifies staff development initiatives or programs in the core content areas which have increased the achievement of urban middle school students.

School Leadership Technology Blog

The University of Minnesota School Technology Leadership Initiative has launched a new blog aimed at K-12 technology leaders The blog is based on a simple premise: that there are too many information channels for any school technology leader to track. The School Technology Leadership blog saves school leaders time by aggregating information from a variety of web sites, listservs, e-mail newsletters, print publications, and other sources. The blog utilizes a distributed authorship model to accomplish its goal of being the “one-stop information source for school technology leadership issues.” Each blog author monitors no more than a small handful of information sources and posts items from those sources on a regular basis. Together the contributors create a powerful resource for K-12 school administrators, educational leadership preparation programs, and others.

	Supporting Teachers to Achieve Results by Integrating Technology into the Curriculum (STAR Tech)
	STAR Tech is an exciting research-based professional development program that helps teachers integrate a full range of technology tools into the curriculum. The Star Tech program is designed to help teachers improve the performance of students with diverse abilities and needs by using a variety of low-, mid-, and high-technology tools. Read more about the goal of STAR Tech .

	Technology Standards for Administrators (TSSA)
	TSSA developed a national consensus on what PK-12 administrators should know about and be able to do to optimize benefits of technology use in schools.