The Texas Long Range Plan for Technology, 2006-2020, is a comprehensive plan that is mapping out a plan for all schools in Texas to be Target Tech schools by the year 2020. A Target Tech campus will be the campus that embeds technology in every spectrum, for all age levels and for all stakeholders (parents, teachers, students). A component of the Texas Long Range Plan for Technology is The Texas STaR Chart. The STaR chart is a teacher tool for planning and self-assessing aligned with the Long-Range Plan for Technology, 2006-2020.
On our campus, the STaR chart showed that Educator Preparation and Development was our greatest weakness on campus. In 2009-2010, we scored developed and that sends up a red flag to myself and should to administrators on campus. What changed in this year that we fell from advanced from the year before and then went up again the year after? As a future administrator, I would look carefully at the sub domains within this area and determine where our weakness lies and how we can improve upon that. Those sub-domains are Professional Development Experiences, Models of Professional Development, Capabilities of Educators, Access to Professional Development, Levels of Understanding and Patterns of Use, and Professional Development for Online Learning. It’s apparent that Professional Development in this area is not strength on our campus and it would be beneficial to ask the teachers what time of professional development would help them long term and then seek those types of presentations/presenters out for our teachers.
