Ask most teachers today what they think of professional development (PD) and you will likely get a negative response. Recent years have seen the introduction of many new state mandated programs. In Ohio, topics such as Student Learning Objectives (SLOs) and Ohio Teacher Evaluation System (OTES) have dominated the agenda for most school district sponsored PD events.
The past two decades in Ohio have seen quite a bit of change in K-12 education. The move to standards based on education began in the mid nineties, with a joint council being formed to oversee the creation of a common set of expections for students completing high school. From this early beginning came academic benchmarks in 2000, academic content standards in 2003, revised again in some content areas in 2008 leading to the
12 CLASSROOM TECHNOLOGY
current move to common core state standards (CCSS) and Ohio's new
learning
standards
on which
the online
testing, slated for February 2015, will be based.
The first decade of the 21st century was marked by an increase in usage of technology in K-12 education. The use of the Internet for research and informaion became commonplace. In the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom we also saw widespread adoptin of Interactice White Boards (IWBs) thought by many to be the beginning of a revolution in teaching with technology.
More recently we have seen cheaper tablet computers such as the iPad in early 2010 and the Google Chromebook in 2011 enabling many schools
Towards a new paradigm in Professional Development
By: John Mansel-Pleydell