Action Plan

As I learned in my Week 3 report, when the site-based decision making committee disaggregated the results of my campus’ STaR Chart results for the 2011-2012 year it realized professional development was needed for online learning, as well as leadership and support for online learning. Due to this, the campus improvement plan includes provisions for providing additional professional development and support for staff in the area of online learning.

Online learning is something that is relatively new, so for this to be an area needing further professional development and support is not surprising. This area of need will be addressed through mini-professional development sessions, as well as full trainings on the integration of technology. Mini-professional development sessions will occur at the beginning of or during faculty meetings. Administration can demonstrate different tools used to enrich the curriculum at the beginning of staff meetings (such as www.polleverywhere.com). Full professional development sessions will be conducted as well. These sessions will include instruction on the use of the district’s new teacher web site technology, as well as training on how to use Moodle to move learning to an online setting as much as possible. I believe the most effective way to evaluate how useful these professional development sessions have been is through observing teachers in action. A more efficient way of evaluating how useful the professional development has been is through a survey 2-3 weeks after the training. Even though this method is more efficient I do not believe you get as accurate results as actual observations.

A tool that has already been implemented and staff still need additional training on is the use of the AWARE module in Eduphoria. This module is used in analyzing student results on state achievement tests, district benchmarks, and classroom assessments. Not only does it allow a teacher to analyze a student’s overall results on these assessments, but it allows teachers to analyze how students perform on specific objectives, as well as specific student expectations for any assessment that has been input into AWARE. In order to help teachers maximize the capabilities of AWARE, it is clear that staff need further training in using this tool. I have had several teachers ask me how to access specific data, such as an entire class’ benchmark data disaggregated by objective performance. Questions like these tell me that teachers have not received enough training in using this tool. I believe a professional development session labeled as, “An AWARE Refresher,” would be an appropriate way to review all the capabilities of AWARE without offending staff. Each department would have an “expert” who would help conduct this training. By requiring each department to have an “expert” on using AWARE, teachers would have yet another resource to contact if they have any further questions on utilizing the capabilities of aware. An online survey or questionnaire is the only method I can think of to evaluate how much teachers are using AWARE and what functions they are finding most useful. I suppose you could track how often each user logs into the Eduphoria suite and use that as a way to estimate how much a given teacher is using AWARE (it would only be an estimate since there are other modules within the Eduphoria suite).