Put Draft 1 of C1 here - 18 February 2008

6.1.1 PD should be ongoing

Professional development is about learning and learning should be ongoing for every teacher. Therefore, any professional development program should enhance the ongoing learning process of teachers. This means that teachers should not only learn in the time of the PD program (e.g. workshops, seminars), but more importantly to continue the learning in their daily professional life. The importance of this ongoing process has been cited in many PD literatures [ref]; yet, this aspect was tent to ignore in many traditional methods of PD programs [ref].

Many online PD programs have emerged to address the problems of traditional PD programs that inhibiting from the continuing process of teacher’s learning, such as lack of support from the experts, lack of resources at school, not fully understand yet the concept that they already got from the PD programs, lack of time, and so on [Ref]. In this situation, the Internet has offered many possibilities for learning and enabled for ongoing learning. In other words, the Internet allows a more flexible learning any where at any time. The ten model of online teacher professional development in the USA, compiled in a book and edited by Chris Dede, are very good to take into consideration in planning any online PD. All these models had been developed carefully. They have addressed many existing problems and faced many challenges.

Debra’s review on this book underlines that in some models such as …., there is a lack of evidence how teachers uses the online resources offered to teachers, and here my study probably adds some new knowledge about how the teachers really use the Internet as a tool for their ongoing learning, including factors supporting and inhibiting them from the effective uses of the Internet for teachers PD.

My study with Ann was to investigate how Ann uses the Internet for PD and teaching mathematics. One of the aspects was to explore how Ann uses the internet for her ongoing PD. My study with Jack was to provide a PD program using ethnographic approach to assist him to use the Internet for his ongoing learning.

In the first case, I found that the Internet enabled Ann to do an ongoing professional development by optimising the potential of the Internet as a source of information and as a medium of communication. The Internet enabled Ann to find useful information through her own access to the Internet at her home or school or from student’s access to the Internet. Ann communicated with other teachers about her teaching and Ann benefited from the mailing list as it informed useful websites for her learning and teaching. Ann admitted that she did not have to wait for a workshop to get information and to share ideas with other teachers/educators. And if Ann attended a workshop, she could explore further about the material in the workshop through the Internet and communicate with other teachers/facilitators if necessary for her.

In the second case, initially I thought two things: (1) the uses of the Internet for ongoing learning and (2) the characteristics of PD that I would offer is ongoing.

To the first idea, I was hoping that my programs would assist Jack to achieve the level where he could see the potential of the Internet for ongoing learning and he would be able to continue by himself in his future as Ann did. My efforts to achieve the first were organising mathematical websites using blogs, and tables of websites, promoting websites through e-mail communications and working closely with Jack in his classroom for a long period of time. My effort in organising the educational websites into blogs and emailing Jack the websites were actually aiming to facilitate Jack to be able to access them easily whenever or wherever he is. The result of this step is unpredictable. Even though there was an email from Jack reporting about the usefulness of my blogs after working several months as a teacher in overseas, I have not enough data to indicate the long term impacts of my research on Jack and this is one of the limitations of this study.

To the second idea, that in my research design, I had planned to leave Jack for a while after seeing him confident enough in using the Internet for his learning and teaching, and I planned to continue my work with Jack in a distance, supporting Jack from outside the classroom, by using emails. In my initial design that I would use blog as a tool to continue my works with Jack even though I was not presence at his classroom. The result of this was not as I expected. The challenge was that it was difficult to get reply to any email that relating to our communication about the learning and the teaching in the classroom, including in responding the learning resources that I provided for him. The issue of the weaknesses of e-mail communications has been discussed in several other studies (e.g. …….). The fact is that interaction through email is different from face to face interaction. In the case of Jack, direct interaction in the classroom often produced immediate feedback on my efforts in promoting the uses of the internet.

How Ann and Jack were so different in the uses of the Internet? What is the most important lesson from Jack case study in terms of expecting teachers to use the email for ongoing learning? How is about the preferences in the media of learning, how about their different context with the already busy schedule, and the email is another challenge for teachers, having email means having additional jobs to read or reply or to act? What is the lesson that we can have about blogging for teachers? Are you expecting teachers to have a blog? What kind of blog that allowing teachers to enhance their PD? I think, we can gain a better insight to these questions by analysing the two cases using the zones theory in Section 6.2.