July 2025:

Sometimes getting started is the most challenging step of learning something new.

This project took on a lot of different iterations throughout the two years of this program. At first, I wanted to design an online repository for shared course outlines and lesson plans from BC Educators, and that project quickly became too big (but I still think it’s important work to move towards Open Ed resources!). Then I had planned to create a whole workshop series and teach them before the end of my program (HA!) — I did not have the time to create all of it and teach it. Through many discussions with peers and professors, I landed on creating an outline for a long term professional development program that focused on developing Teacher Digital Literacy skills. This program is based on the currently available research, and widely agreed upon characteristics of what makes “effective” (Ertmer et al., 2012) professional development.

What I think sets apart this program I’ve designed are two key characteristics:

  1. It uses teacher change in practice as a metric to determine success (and not student achievement).
  2. It is designed for face-to-face or online (or even a blend of both).

Throughout much of the research, student achievement was used as a determiner as to whether or not a professional development workshop was successful. I don’t believe that’s a valid measurement to determine whether a teacher’s digital literacy skills have improved. I encourage future researchers to consider how we’re evaluating professional development workshops and teacher change.

As you move through the menus under the “Teacher Digital Literacy” menu, you will see it’s organized by themes. All of the documents were created using Google Docs and as I update them, they will automatically be updated on the blog. I’ve also created a resources page where it’s a Google Doc with all of the resources I reference in the course outline.

This blog is intended to share my research and my ideas about effective professional development for teacher digital literacy. I have chosen to publicly share my work in the hopes that other people will be able to use my program design to improve their digital literacy skills. The blog will be written in a more information style to help people get started on implementing the program. I will also include links to Google doc files what are open access. You may make copies of these files and save them, however this work is openly licensed via CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 and I request that you respect the terms of the license. Individuals are permitted to share, copy, adapt, and redistribute this material for non-commercial purposes, provided that proper credit is given to the author and no endorsement is implied. An example of attribution is “This work was created by Jacqueline Bascombe [@lacurieuseenseignante] and is licensed for use under an Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.” 

Where, and when possible, I have hyperlinked resources on my blog, and in the lesson plans, for you so that you have direct access to the information that helped to shape my project along the way. These may be research articles, open resources, video files, or other digital materials I found useful. I made a resources page which will be accessible through the blog and include the resources included in the posts for this project.

The purpose of this project was to read the available literature on teacher professional development, explore learning theories, and design a professional development program to support teachers in improving their digital literacy skills. This project is founded on social constructivism, Lev Vygotsky’s theory of social learning and Zone of Proximal Development (1978) and Wenger’s (1998) Communities of Practice.

This project was designed as a course outline that people can use as a guide to develop their one professional development or establish their own Communities of Practice (I won’t be offering a course myself).

Much of the research into teacher professional development in regards to integrating technology acknowledges that there’s lots of work to be done and changes need to be made to provide better support for educators. While it’s the general consensus among the researchers, there seems to have been little action towards making changes to professional development. This course outline is offered as a starting place.

Happy Learning!