The focus of this year’s mEducation Alliance Symposium was “the role of the teacher and community educator, and how technology can provide greater support for their professional development, motivation, networking, and delivery of instruction in traditional and non-traditional educational settings.”
I was embarrassingly excited when the announcement was made a few months ago. I’m not sure there’s anything considered less sexy at an ed tech conference than teacher PD (…although I would disagree), but more critical for student outcomes.
Florian presented on UNICEF Kenya’s overall work around education technology (universal accessible textbook, Kenyan Education Cloud etc.) and then we dove into our presentation on Prototyping Professional Development: Upskilling Teachers for Digital Literacy. It was fun to present our approach on designing, delivering and iterating on quality PD for teachers, and learn from what others were doing at the conference. I was particularly interested in the landscape review of large-scale teacher PD models produced by TPD@Scale Coalition.
They identified five key factors that continuously arose in the landscape review critical to scaling TPD: scale, spread, depth, sustainability and shift. The emphasis on implementing immediately at scale was one that clashed with our design principles around iterating and testing for different needs and contexts (and then of course scaling what works), but I’m open and curious to see what comes forward from the final landscape review in February. And last but certainly not least…
Ariam's ARCADE 
Thoughts