Project Based Educational Technology Professional Development

Our paper is a progress report on the provision of professional development workshops for educators within an institute of higher education. The aim of the workshops is to teach educators the necessary theoretical and practical skills to enable them to use Web 2.0 tools – blogs, wikis & social bookmarking – to enhance their teaching. We have refined the workshops over a two-year period in order to engage educators at a deep level with the potential of Web 2.0 tools for teaching. This resulted in a project based workshop format requiring participants to complete a learning design activity template. We instituted a more complex learning design template and research results reported in this paper indicate that this was a mistake. We have therefore returned to a more straightforward learning design template. We have also revised our post-workshop support model to try to increase the number of workshop participants who put what they learn into practice.