Assimilating Online Technologies into School Culture

The goal of this research was to design, implement, and evaluate a three-year Teacher Professional Development (TPD) model with a socio-constructivist approach, intended to support teachers to design and develop their own online activities and enable schools to assimilate online technologies into their school-culture. The TPD was implemented in three schools with 45 teachers. Quantitative and qualitative analyses show that online activities developed by teachers toward the end of the intervention had a significantly higher pedagogical value than those developed at the beginning of the intervention. Additionally, the amount of action in all three of the schools' websites significantly increased throughout the intervention and continued to stay high one year afterwards. Four main teacher
profiles emerged, showing how schools became less dependent on the external mentor and gradually learned to build on local resources and social capital to maintain the high quality and quantity of the online instruction. Interpreting these findings using two frameworks – the school reform framework and the technology adoption life-cycle framework – we evaluate that the change processes in the schools were both substantial and sustainable. We conclude that, with proper TPD, teachers can play a key role as designers and developers of their own online activities.