A voluntary group of teachers who gather to study and discuss aspects of the teaching profession with the goal of improving their skills and knowledge in the educational field.
Published in Chapter:
A Scenario That Works: Adapting the Army's Soldier Skills Training Model to Teach K-12 Teachers Technology
Patricia K. Gibson (Texas State University, USA), Dennis A. Smith (Campbell University, USA), and Sarah G. Smith (Ireland Drive Middle School, USA)
Copyright: © 2018
|Pages: 8
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-5667-1.ch013
Abstract
Technology use in K-12 classrooms in this era of rapid high-tech change ranges from deep and meaningful technological immersion to an outright classroom ban on electronic devices. Attempting to mitigate this technological divide between students and teachers, school districts increasingly require professional development in applicable student technologies and teacher support resources. Unfortunately, the standards for continuing education requirements are broad, money is tight, and development efforts are often far less organized. As unfortunate, current issues and general information sharing dominate the professional learning communities (PLCs) or teacher learning communities (TLCs) originally designed to fulfill professional development requirements. These challenges render the occasional professional development initiative included in a PLC or TLC event, ineffective where the fragmented, uninteresting, and often poorly planned technology instruction very rarely seems to stick. Drawing on experience with military training and continuing education training, the authors propose a simple, inexpensive, and internally resourced means used by soldiers to train individual and collective military tasks, to assist elementary and secondary teachers to learn how emerging technology works, and more importantly, how to maximize its effective use in the classroom.