Chart week – Teacher professional development

Today is the last day of Chart Week here at Dangerously Irrelevant. Today’s

post addresses teacher professional development regarding classroom Internet

usage. All data are from the recently-released NCES report, Internet Access

in U.S. Public Schools and Classrooms: 1994-2005

.

Professional development for use of the Internet in public school

classrooms

The chart below shows that 83% of public schools said that they or the

district offered professional development to teachers on classroom Internet

use in 2005.

Of course, just because professional development is offered doesn’t mean that

teachers participate. The data below show that in 2005 only about a third of districts

said that they were able to get more than 75% of their teachers to participate.

Another third or do said that less than one-fourth of their teachers

participated in such training. These numbers were slightly better than in 2002.

There are a variety of reasons why teachers might not participate in

professional development related to classroom use of the Internet. The training

offered might not be worthwhile or at convenient times, teachers might feel they

have more pressing professional development needs, etc. However, in an era when information / media

/ Internet literacy have become vitally important, these numbers are at least

somewhat concerning.

So what did we learn?

Here are the rest of the posts from Chart Week:

• Monday – Internet

access in public schools

laptops and wireless classrooms

of student laptop loans

safety

What did we learn this week? We learned that most schools and classrooms have

wired connections to the Internet but that classroom wireless penetration is

stagnant. We learned that student laptop usage is minimal, both overall and even

in schools where students get to use them. We learned that significant

percentages of schools fail to have students or parents affirmatively sign that

they have read and understand acceptable use policies. And today we learned that

teacher professional development may not be furthering our goals related to

information and media literacy.

As in other areas, these data show that we have work to do.