Khwal12's Blog

Technology PD

In my 16 years at St. Theresa School and prior to that working in a variety of corporate and educational environments I have found that getting staff to participate in professional development activities is a very challenging task. In addition, just to getting participation, there is the very critical matter of getting the staff to utilize the information or skills that they are being taught. Unfortunately my experience has been that if there is not a mandate from the administration that says that a staff member must attend the training and must utilize the training content or else be faced with disciplinary action, that most professional development sessions offer little benefit to the staff. While I have encountered a number of staff over the years that have engaged with a Professional Personal Learning Network on their own, those individuals are few and far between. I strongly believe that this is a critical reason for the lack of advancement and improvement in our overall educational systems. As long as I continue to be involved in the field of education, I will continue to not only support, but also advocate for better utilization of Professional Development not only for the staff, but also to support the parents of the children we are charged with teaching. Since the start of the 2020-2021 school year, I have tried to provide the staff of the St. Theresa PreK Program with essential skills involving Hybrid and Bended Learning tools, as well as tools for online instruction in the event of a need to close the program temporarily for COVID protocols. More recently I have been providing instruction not only in the current technology being used in this program, but also with new tools to make it possible for teachers to record and be able to share lesson content online with students who may miss program activities due to extended illness or the need to quarantine because of members of their family who might have COVID or the children themselves having COVID, or the instructional staff of the program being out with COVID. Hopefully some of these tools will continue to be of use to the staff as we close out the 2021-2022 school year.