Educator Preparation and Development

Of the four areas of the Texas long Range Plan for Technology the one area that I believe needs to be seriously and urgently addressed is Educator Preparation and Development.
As the population of the state and the country to continue to grow rapidly and the baby boom generation of teachers begin to retire, schools are already seeing a shortage of qualified teachers. The teacher workforce that is recruited and employed to fill this shortage will need to have the skills of a 21th century educator. Those skills will include the ability to use the communications technology of the 21th century along with the educator skills needed to teach students how to use the technology to access and process the information that now lays at their fingertips. While this is occurring, the baby boom generation of teachers that is still in the education workforce will need to be educated to the new technolgy and ways to use it to enhance student learning.
The university programs that are training and certifying teachers are currently responsible for the task that I have outlined above, but the school districts across the state and country are responsible for the continuous and on going training of the teacher workforce if they want to see improvement in the learning of students. Veteran teachers are too valuable to lose and too dangerous to remain in the classroom without the technological skills necessary to reach today's students. School districts must provide the training or the incentives for teachers to get the training themselves in the summertime.
My campus is beginning to loose its vetran teachers. There are only about 20 classroom teachers out of 150 with more than 5 years experience. Being one of these teachers, I can attest to the fact that we veteran teachers lack the technology skills need to meet the requirments of the Long Range Technology Plan. Yet, we have huge amounts of knowledge and valuable experience that should not be wasted. We simply need the technology skills training to help put us in tune with our students. And by training, I don't mean a day of in-service at the start of each semester. I would recommend that the school district pay for any teacher, veteran or novice to take computer literacy classes at the local university or provide classes that last more than two weeks. Our district does offer summer techology classes but they are condensed and do not offer the wide range of supervised practice that is necessary for retention.
Today's students cannot wait for tomorrow's teachers to be trained. The Educator Preparation and Development component of Star Chart is showing us that there is advancement taking place. We are improving and moving towards meeting the requirments of the Long Range Plan for Technology, but we cannot fail to meet the needs of the students of 2010 simply because we feel we will meet our target for the students of 2020.