Designing Professional Development for Sustainable Educational Technology Usage: Lessons Learnt from Utah K-12 Teachers

Abstract

Professional development (PD) programs do not always reach the teacher or allow for sustained usage of technology. However, recent studies show that teachers are more open to use technology after increased technology dependence during the COVID-19 pandemic. Motivated by that new openness to technology integration, we used interview and survey data to examine teachers’ current practices for learning technology, features of PD that they consider effective and technologies that they want to learn in the future. We found that teachers learn technology in both formal and informal ways, through district-organized PD, independent learning and or by asking for help from peers. We also learned what kinds of technologies teachers want to learn more about, and that active learning and lack of cognitive overload are two of the most important features of PD for teachers in our study. Based on those findings, we offer three concrete recommendations for PD program designers.