Multi-State Online Professional Development ToolKit

Changing professional development and meeting teacher needs

MOPD - A Model for Online Professional Development

Best Practices

This section of the ToolKit provides information, examples and illustrations of success stories and quality practices. These best practices inform and support persons unfamiliar with online learning about how this instruction can meet student academic needs. This page, like all of the other ToolKit pages, provides easy access to documents, Web sites and other materials that contain up-to-date and reliable information to assist in planning and developing online courses.

A District Story: Building Local Capacity in Educational Technology. EdTech Leaders Online, 2001.
http://main.edc.org/Mosaic/Mosaic4/leaders.asp
This article, which was published in the Winter 2001 issue of Mosaic: An EDC Report Series, describes how several school districts in rural Louisiana have worked with EDC's Center for Online Professional Education and the EdTech Leaders Online model of professional development to build local capacity in educational technology. The story is part of a collection of articles in the issue that focus on the theme of "Communities Online: Building a Space for Professional Learning."

BEEP Online Academic and Student Support Services, with an Update on Student Portals 

http://www.spjc.edu/eagle/research/beep/beep42.htm

Beep, Best Educational E-Practices, is a publication of St. Petersburg College. A wide variety of support services now provided electronically are available here.  BEEP first examined student portals in 2003, and this publication provides an update to that original publication (BEEP #29 2/1/03).

EdTech GEAR: Online Professional Development Generating Equal Access to Remote Areas in Tennessee.
http://www.edtechleaders.org/about/research/articles/gear.asp

“Two goals for Tennessee's GEAR grant program are (1) build local capacity for high-quality, ongoing professional development in technology integration, especially in remote areas and (2) use online professional development to promote teacher effective use of technology in classroom instruction.” GEAR resulted from the ETLO participation by Jerry Bates, Director of Applied School Technology from Tennessee, and is currently in process.

Elements of Successful Online Professional Development Programs, Barbara Treacy, Glenn Kleiman, and Kirsten Peterson (September 2002).
http://main.edc.org/newsroom/Features/ETLO_ISTE.asp

This article presents an overview of the key lessons learned in the EdTech +Leaders Online (ETLO) program about how online learning can build capacity for technology integration and help school districts, state departments of Education, regional service providers and teacher training programs meet the challenge of providing effective professional development for teachers and administrators. It includes a description of the learning community approach to online professional development and important lessons learned through the implementation of this approach in school districts throughout the country. One central message is that online professional development is most effective when it is integrated with face-to-face activities in a multi-faceted, ongoing professional development program. This article was published in the September 2002 issue of Learning & Leading with Technology, a publication of the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE).
 

Implementation of the EdTech Leaders Online (ETLO) Program for Milwaukee Public School District; Summary Report. Prepared by Laura M. O'Dwyer for Barbara Tracey, Managing Project Director, EdTech Leaders Online. (Nov 2005)
ETLO_Report.pdf
EdTech Leaders Online (ETLO) is a capacity-building online professional development program that prepares teams of participants from local school districts to facilitate and manage an online professional development program to meet local goals and needs. Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) has participated in Education Development Center's ETLO program since fall 2002. Through Milwaukee's participation in this program, over 40 MPS staff members have been trained as online specialists. Beginning in 2003, the trained online specialists began delivering ETLO's online workshops for MPS teachers and administrators. To date, approximately 140 online workshops have been delivered. The MPS/ETLO program is ongoing and continues to expand, with additional workshops conducted during the 2004 - 2005 school year. Since fall 2002, over 1000 MPS teachers have already been impacted by the online workshops delivered by MPS facilitators. This report is an in-depth description of implementation of the ETLO program in Milwaukee Public Schools.

Online Professional Development for Teachers: A Collaborative Model, Barbara Treacy and Kirsten Johnson, Education Development Center Inc.(EDC), Merrick Lofton, Catahoula Parish, LA School Board, and Paula Paul, Concordia Parish, LA School Board (August 1999).
http://www2.edc.org/lnt/news/Issue10/feature2.htm

This article is about the first in a series of online professional development workshops organized as a collaboration between EDC and two Louisiana school districts through a U.S. Department of Education Technology Innovation Challenge Grant, "America 2000: Making Inroads to the Backroads." The article describes the project background and the workshops' design and organization, and it provides a detailed focus on the facilitation model designed to support the workshop goals and participant needs.

Online Staff Development Lessons Learned. The Florida Instructional Technology Resource Center at University of Central Florida.
http://www.itrc.ucf.edu/LL/LL.pdf
This document provides information for online staff development from the perspectives of developer, facilitator and participant. “These 'lessons' have been gleaned from a thorough review of the literature and a survey sent to over 200 developers, facilitators/instructors and participants who reviewed, validated, and critiqued the lessons.”

 

For more information, e-mail Bill Thomas at bill.thomas@sreb.org.