Staff Development and Information Technology in a Hong Kong Secondary School PDF Download

Author: Shiu-Kwong Lau
Publisher: Open Dissertation Press
ISBN: 9781374713406
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Languages : en
Pages :

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This dissertation, "Staff Development and Information Technology in a Hong Kong Secondary School" by Shiu-kwong, Lau, 劉少光, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: x ABSTRACT Teachers are crucial to the integration of technology for teaching and learning. As the government provides a large amount of public money to prepare teachers for the information age, schools begin to initiate their own teacher training programmes. This study, using both quantitative and qualitative research methods, attempts to investigate whether such training courses are useful and to look for possible ways in conducting staff development programmes in a secondary school. The first part of the study involved a questionnaire survey. The instrument was derived from Kirkman's (2000) model for effective management of information and communications technology development in schools. It was administered to the same batch of teachers in 2001 and 2003. The findings of this survey revealed that there was not significant difference in most of the factors, showing that the staff development programme of the school was not very effective. Three factors were perceived to be significantly different after a period of two years. They were the student, human resource and delivery factor. The first factor was natural because students' computer literacy level rose speedily when the majority of primary schools began to provide computer classes after 1998. The human resource factor simply referred to the appointment of an IT-coordinator in a subject department. Obviously this was regarded as useful in helping teachers. However, findings revealed that the school became less supportive to teachers' teaching with IT as the delivery factor (referring to a xi system that assists teachers in IT) was perceived significantly lower than it was two years ago. This can be attributed to the fact that the school did not have a school vision on IT integration. Difference between the subject departments and their heads were compared but there seemed to be little significant difference in various aspects even though the computer literacy level of the heads differed enormously. The second part of the study involved an ethnographic study that was used to triangulate the data collect from the questionnaire survey. The findings were found to be in line with those of the quantitative study. It also revealed that the roles of the IT coordinator, department head and particularly, the subject IT agent in the subject department, were vital in promoting the use of IT among the teachers in the school. The findings of the study suggest that schools should adopt some model as yardstick to check for progress of their staff development plans. They should also formulate a vision on the implementation of IT plans in school. It is also important to communicate the vision to all the members of the staff. Without such a blueprint, many forms of training and IT courses will become fragmented and short-termed. It will be difficult to learn how successful a school has been in preparing teachers for the IT integration. DOI: 10.5353/th_b2961685 Subjects: Education, Secondary - Computer-assisted instruction - China - Hong Kong Teachers - In-service training - China - Hong Kong Computer literacy - China - Hong Kong