Teachers' Professional Development in the Digitized World: A Sample Blended Learning Environment for Educational Technology Training

Introduction

Professional development for in-service teachers has increasingly become a need in the education field not only in Turkey, but across the world. Due to the limited time teachers have and the distance between the source of service and the potential participants, using digitized activities and materials have naturally become a necessity. In the digitized world, teachers are expected to develop their technological pedagogical knowledge so as to keep up with the developing pedagogical innovations.

With the growth of digital facilities, professional development activities for teachers have become more visual and comprehensible. However, in developing countries, teachers who grew up with non-technological environment experience challenges in the digitized world, which makes it really difficult to deal with the changing nature of the training materials for their professional development. Turkey is one of the examples of such educational settings with several contextual constraints for the integration of digitized teacher development activities. Moreover, teachers do not have enough opportunities offered by their institutions. However, they attempt to develop professionally by searching materials on the Internet and attending relevant conferences or short courses.

It has also been observed that professional development activities which are more regular, organized and focused on the integration of technology into teaching rather than learning about how to use technological tools are needed. The training program offered in this study is planned according to this need. The purpose of this research is to report the potential impact of ‘The Certificate Program for Educational Technology’ (ETUSP) course described in this study and discuss the role of blended professional development program on the participating teachers. The theoretical background of the study is experiential learning initiated by Kolb and socio-constructivist learning theory by Vygotsky in that both theories highlight the role of experiencing the change and focus on personal meanings and learning with and from others in real environments.