Texas Long Range Plan for Technology 2006-2020

Educator Preparation:
One of the key aspects to ensure Educator Preparation is to provide the staff with professional development that is relevant to using technology in the classroom. Teachers should be able to use their professional development experiences to create higher-order thinking web-based projects for their classroom. Also, teachers are expected to know how to use online resources to aid in classroom teaching. One other aspect of Educator Preparation is to ensure that the ideas and projects learned in the professional development experiences are actually being implemented into the classroom so that it "empowers students to think critically to solve real-world problems and communicate with experts across business, industry and higher education". This information is directly taken from the Texas Teacher STaR Chart manual.
In 2007-2008 the Campus Statewide Summary showed that 74.2% of all campuses involved scored a "Developing Tech" in the category for Educator Preparation. 40% of educators meet SBEC standards. The next highest percentage at 19.9% scored an "Advanced Tech" in this area. 60% of educators meet SBEC standards here. My local school scored with the norm by getting a "Developing Tech" result.
I believe that we are making good progress in this area. It is going to take a few more years for teachers to get comfortable with the fact that technology is here to stay and can and will be a very useful tool for not only managing the classroom but for inspiring learning. The trend is that this area is rising as a whole. On my campus, we actually fell 2 points from 2007-2008 to 2008-2009. I believe that next year the numbers will continue to rise and that overall, we will see an increase in the national, state, and local campus use for technology. The reason that I believe that we will increase is that technology use is rising in our students and in order to keep up with them, educators have to continue to be innovative in the classroom or they will no longer have a job.
My recommendation for improvement in this area is to have mandatory mini-professional development opportunities for specific programs or projects that will help the need-areas for each grade in my school. This would be implemented on a monthly basis and teachers would be highly encouraged to create a project that is meaningful to their content area and has specific technological requirements. This would show the teachers that feel inferior to technology that they are capable of creating fun projects that their kids can relate to. This will also foster a sense of collaborative learning communities within the grade level or content area.