Analysis Of The IREX Professional Development Program

The findings of the study suggested that the IREX professional development program had profound impact on participating teachers’ knowledge and agenda of technology.

Analysis of teachers’ projects showed that teachers demonstrated greater knowledge and skills of computer, mobile devices and the Internet at the end of professional development than prior to the program. Blog reflections, post-program surveys, video interviews, and communications through facebook during the year following the IREX program has documented numerous attempts by these teachers to integrate their IREX experience into their curriculum and promote technology-rich and student-centered learning environment.

The IREX professional development program was effective. Not only did it improve teachers’ technology skills and practices in ways that support technology and learning, it also helped reshape the participating teachers’ views and perceptions of technology and technological pedagogy. Further, the program successfully introduced and engaged teachers in using mobile devices (e.g. iPad, laptop) and social media (e.g. blog, twitter, facebook) to build a virtual learning community to share knowledge, experiences and best practices related to the concepts of technology integration in education. Development of effective teacher communities takes great effort and is time-consuming (Grossman, Wineburg & Woolworth, 2001; Stein, Smith & Silver, 1999). We are happy to see that this learning community extends far beyond the teachers’ actual attendance at the program and is still actively maintained and supported by teacher voluntarily one year after. We think this, to some extent, reflects the quality and impact of the IREX program.

All IREX teachers were from develop...

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...communications and collaborations. The ownership of teaching and learning was shared by teachers and facilitators. During the 6-week residency program, teachers had many opportunities to actively engage in thoughtful discourse, support and challenge each other, examine and compare different perspectives, and eventually process and internalize their learning.

3). Deeply Embedded Professional Learning. The IREX program at BGSU employed a Deeply Embedded Professional Development (DEPD) model as a means to “replace one-shot, one-way programs with long-term collegial work” (Fischer, Hamer, Zimmerman, Samel, Long & McArthur, 2004, p.204). Different from common application-driven technology workshops, the IREX program supported teachers by providing intensive, on-going, collaborative and sustained training with effective modeling, mentoring and collective problem-solving.