March 3, Chapter 5

Professional Development is a loaded term in the realm of education. There are many books and articles out there that discuss the elements within the scope of pd and how those elements contribute to the success and failures of web 2.0 practices. This chapter starts with the increased pressures of federal, state, and local governments on education. With the increased mandates in technology the technology standards has arisen to support pre and post in-services (ISTE, 2000). With the added pressures on high stakes testing the U.S. Department of Education has increased the focus of technology standards throughout education (Amrein & Berliner, 2003). According to the U.S. Department of Education, even though massive amounts of money have been spent on professional development, many school institutions have not done an adequate job in teacher training. I agree with that to some degree, the author says, “Traditional staff development has tended to be based on one model: a one-day session, often four hours right after school when everyone is tired and focused on other issues.” I think we do a little bit better job in Calcasieu Parish. We send our teachers on many whole day in-services and those particular teachers come back to and train the others. Many of our educators are not trained sufficiently in web 2.0 to get good feedback in the advantages of those web 2.0 tools or like I mentioned earlier they are not adequately supported with follow-ups. The disadvantages are numerous and they start with limited reinforcement. That leads to not enough experts in the school not being able to train the rest of the staff and that leads to staff still being resistant. The author writes, “With all of the support and training seemingly provided, many teachers are still viewed as resistant to integrating technology on a more frequent basis. Now we are requesting that educators change their practice in ways to take advantage of the opportunities of web 2.0” (Location 2010). The problem with this is if I asked the teachers at my school “What is web 2.0?” the overwhelming majority would not know even if they are doing some of its components i.e. podcasting.
Communities of practice are personal learning networks in the virtual social world that contribute to the cultural context of learning. This applies to students as well as teachers. Dede (2003) says, Emerging devices, tools, media, and virtual environments offer opportunities for creating new types of learning communities for students and teachers. The author uses an encyclopedia about Harry Potter’s fictional world and Milwaukee educators sharing ideas about effective instruction. These communities encourage participation, create trust, eliminate confusion, create interactive dialogue, and make learning interactive. I belong to The Educator’s PLN, a personal learning network on everything technology and best practices (www.edupln.ning.com). I have used this network many times to promote pd in the web 2.0 tools and technology.