Professional Development

Professional development is a great way to improve the quality of teaching/ learning presses. I think teachers should attend, participate or organize PD regularly to develop their skills. However, most of the teachers don’t have enough time or chance to participate in educational technology professional development to improve the teacher skills. Many experts think that to solve this issue teacher should work smarter in creating a helpful educational technology professional development within the time limitation. 

Since I have been here for just 2 years I don’t have that experience about professional development in the USA. However, I worked as social worker in a hospital in Saudi Arabia. I had the chance to participate in a few professional developments to integrate technology in the hospital. For example, the hospital got a new voice machine to record the patient report then print it out automatically. All the stuff in the hospital had been trained and introduced to the new machine for two months.  As a result, the new machine became a very successful tool for writing the patient’s report at the hospital and all the staff was ready and well trained to use it.

I believe Professional Development has to be a collaborative process. Everyone needs to be part of the educational technology professional development in order for it to be effective and improve teaching and learning, without making it individual responsibility of anyone, educator or expert.