Technology Based Summary

A brief summary of core concepts, lessons learned, and keys to implementation.

Professional Development

ADDIE

Technology

WHY PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT IS IMPORTANT

Leaders know that ultimately people are the drivers of innovation and success in any organization. So it is critical that your people are technically proficient and skilled in their craft. This should be simple, most employees WANT to be good at their job. So why does professional development have such a bad reputation?

Not a Sprint Support Gap Boring

Marathon not a Sprint:

The development of human capital through professional development is a long term process; put simply, investing in your employees takes time. Additionally, technology based professional development should be rooted in curriculum, and tied to long-term strategic initiatives. Administrations should establish the goals they want to achieve, then begin developing a solution. When strategic goals are poorly defined, it leaves too much freedom to change methods in the middle of execution. Administrators should NOT be swayed by the education industry prepackaged solutions. Especially if they are peddling solutions to problems that don’t exist.

Administration Support Gap:

Professional development should be ongoing and purposeful. Too often there is an abundance of support in the beginning but administrative support slowly subsides. When administrative support falls off, you can expect employee motivation to follow. Why should the employee complete last year’s initiatives when the administration has already moved on to something new?

Boring Content

Uninspired, dull training can ruin even the best intentions for employee professional development. Your employees won’t be getting all they can out of the training if it is putting them to sleep. However, that does not mean it is necessary to ‘gamify’ professional development, but it does mean that curriculum developers who pay attention to attention spans will be much more successful.

Instructional Design

The ADDIE Model

Analysis

Analysis can be simple, which could include being reflective about your workday: what went well and what did not. Analysis can also be complex and scaled to fit larger organizations. Larger organizations can take a more data driven approach to analysis compiling sales, clicks, or keyword searches. The crux of the ADDIE model of is establishing the problem that needs to be solved or the gap that needs to be mitigated.

Design

Design, within the ADDIE framework, is the process of establishing objectives that the instructional system will achieve. This could include the method of instruction or in a prototype, how the user will interact with the model.

Development

Development is the creation of the content that will ultimately meet the objectives laid out during analysis.

Implement

Implementation is the roll-out phase of the ADDIE framework. This would include the delivery of new curriculum created during the development phase.

Evaluate

Evaluation is a series of tests that are paired with the original objectives that were established. Evaluation helps determine the success of the model and may include feedback from users or participants.

TECHNOLOGY:

Teacher Survey

A study sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation title ‘Teachers Know Best’ conducted a survey of teacher opinions on technology in the classroom. The teachers surveyed cited several obstacles to technology integration in the classroom including: awareness, availability, and cost.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/edtech-production/reports/Teachers-Know-Best-2.0.pdf

Digital tool effectiveness at meeting students’ learning needs:

Effective / Very effective59%

59%

Somewhat effective29%

29%

Somewhat ineffective6%

Ineffective/ Very ineffective6%

The Bottom Line

Technology is GREAT! It has the power to excite the imagination and inspire our audience. However, technology is not a panacea; it must be rooted in curriculum and serve a strategic purpose. Technology just for its own sake is seldom useful and worse, is often a waste of limited resources.

Here are the three things to consider when implementing technology

Cost

The cost of implementing technology is always an important factor. However, what may be less obvious is the full life-cycle support of its implementation. It is important to plan for hardware support as well as ongoing training in order to ensure your staff is fully trained.

Support

In order to close the gap between implementation and execution, technology implementation requires continual support from the administration.

Strategy

Technology should always support a long term goal. In order to do that you need an accurate assessment of where you are and where you want to go. A long-term strategy will keep your technology implementation purposeful and specific.