Sunday, September 16, 2007

Professional development for teachers

Cole (2003) talks about education technology workshops for teachers being held in USA. She points to a crowded room of teachers watching presenters using a PowerPoint presentation pontificating about how to create highly interactice lessons! Cole queries (as I do) how effective this approach is.

Cole believes that teachers need to be engaged, understand the objectives of the learning, and participate in meaningful activities.

Cole also acknowledge that planning meaningful learning experiences takes a lot of time and that the implementation of these experiences will often take longer than delivering old-fashioned lectures.

Points that Cole (2003) makes about those delivering technology workshops is that they to:

- provide opportunities for collaboration
- utilise staff members
- keep class sizes manageable
- engage in meaningful and authentic tasks
- encourage critical thinking (teachers should question why they are using the technologies and in fact sometimes the use of technologies is not the best tool for that particular task)

Video by Derek Wenmouth about Teachers as professional learners:

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