ARRA grants will have a focus on collaboration, meaningful PD

I went to a seminar today on the technology-related No Child Left Behind and American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) grants that were being administered by Massachusetts over the next two years. Although much of the seminar focused on details and procedures specific to the Commonwealth, a few themes emerged that have much broader applicability.

The first was meaningful professional development. So often, PD in technology is simply teaching teachers how to use an application. While this is obviously a necessary piece of what we do, it no longer really meets the standards of "professional development" for teachers. Rather, technology PD must enhance what a teacher does in the classroom.

For example, Massachusetts recently created an online data warehouse containing our state standardized testing data, as well as other data that we can upload. It the allows both cross-sectional and longitudinal data analysis and is an incredibly powerful tool for identifying instructional gaps and challenges. While we will certainly offer training on the use of the data warehouse and navigation of this monster resource, real professional development that could be funded under federal grant opportunities would need to include plans for integrating the data analysis into classroom instruction/curriculum and feedback mechanisms to evaluate the effectiveness of the PD and of new classroom strategies built from the PD.

This isn't a bad thing, by any means. Quite frankly, it's about time that we gave much more serious thought to how we're really using technological tools rather than simply building a teacher's toolkit.

The second major theme for these grants was collaboration. Because the actual amount of money going to individual schools or districts is not particularly large, pooling resources can make a lot more sense. For example, some of the ARRA money could fund the planning and development efforts to facilitate fiber connections among buildings and neighboring districts with an eye towards a shared data center (funds will be available later on through other mechanisms and agencies to actually support improvement in broadband and connectivity).

Similarly, several districts could work together to develop and host distance learning courses that students from any of the participating districts could take. Sharing the cost of hosting and hardware and sharing expertise and development time would allow a much broader range of courses with a greater benefit to a larger group of students.

Details are still emerging about the exact implementation of these grants. However, it's quite clear that we are ushering in a new way of doing business in educational technology. It's about time.