RFP for a PD database

[Demetri Orlando]

Do you use software to keep track of professional development? What features do you like about it.

I've been looking around for a web-hosted solution for keeping track of our teachers' professional development. The system we envision has two levels of access. An individual level, in which individual teachers can update what they have done, and an administrator level at which administrators can see reports that show what all teachers (or individual teachers) have done.

Our school has three divisions, so we would want to be able to assign teachers to a certain division so that that division's administrator would only see those teachers' records, but a system administrator would be able to see everyone's records. This feature is not a deal-breaker. It would not be a big problem if all administrators could see all records, so long as they could sort by their division.

It would be useful if teachers could use the system to receive approval to attend events from their supervisors. In this scenario, a teacher would log into the system and enter an event details entry and trigger a request for approval to an administrator. Once an administrator approves an event, that would trigger a message back to the teacher notifying them that the event has been approved. This feature is not a hard requirement if it significantly increases cost. We could skip it, and just use the database to keep track of completed events only.

Division administrators might want to be able to enter upcoming PD events into the system and then recommend those events to certain teachers.

The database would need to be multi-user and robust enough to handle several concurrent connections. The types of info we need in the database include:

User Info
- first name
- last name
- division
- job title
- number of years of service (based on employment start date)
- degree(s) info: degree(s) completed or working towards, dates, institutions, majors
- database security user type (administrator or teacher)

Professional Development Activities
- Event format (conference, seminar, workshop, after-school meeting, etc.)
- Event focus (e.g. technology, diversity, differentiated instruction, etc.)
- Event title
- Event goal/objectives (what will you learn or be able to do after this event?)
- Event date & time
- Event duration (Number of hours)
- Event designation: internal or external
- Event location
- Event sponsoring entity
- Event website address
- Event status (requested, approved, completed)
- Event eligible to count towards continuing education credits
- Event follow-up details field (how will this event affect classroom practice)
- Events at which this person has been the presenter instead of the participant

Professional Goals Table
- Goal type (e.g. technology, diversity, differentiated instruction, etc.)
- Goal title
- Goal details
- Goal status (percent completed)

Reports available to administrators:
- list view shows all teachers (by division), total number of hours currently completed, and events attended
- granular view to see all events of all teachers by event focus type
- list view to show all goals of all teachers
- lists showing what teachers are enrolled in what upcoming events

Addenda: (added after this discussion was posted)
By the way, if you are a Filemaker Pro user, you might want to contact David Baker at Mt. Tam about this topic. In October of 2008 he posted a message to the ISED-L list-serve that said he was developing a Filemaker database for this and would be happy to collaborate with other FileMaker users. His email is dbaker at mttam.org

Another company offering a product can be found here:
http://allofe.com/gen/corp_generated_pages/Product_Home_m228.html

[Demetri Orlando]

I'm talking about Brad Gerring who has posted twice on this page (above.) He has addressed the date issue and the American spelling of "Enroll." I think that if you go to his website, you can find contact info, or you can message him on this network. His product is already fully created, so it does everything that my RFP had outlined (and more!)
thanks

[DeAnne Hainlen]

I mentioned details about this on another thread. Our district is using Eduphoria: Workshop. You can enter sessions that teachers register for online, denote credit types that you set up (GT etc.), create groups (ours are mostly based on campus assignments so that principals can see their teachers but I have a mentor group and a librarian group also). You can assign goals to the sessions that you enter (I entered our district goals), and you can track staff development for NCLB. You can run attendance reports, sub reports (for staff dev that occurs during the school day), and instructor reports. Teachers can also enter portfolio credit requests for out-of-district staff development.
This system is perfect for my needs as the Director of Staff Development in a school district with approximately 1200 teachers!

DeAnne Hainlen
Director of Staff Development
Eagle Mountain-Saginaw ISD

[Sarah Hanawald]

Demetri,

What did you end up doing with your online PD tracker?

Just wondering,
Sarah

[Demetri Orlando]

We got an account with PDtracker. Our lower school director of studies is piloting it, and as far as I know, she's happy with it. When we set up the account we requested several tweaks, and Brad was very responsive. e.g. he set it up so that we would see the school year of items as opposed to a calendar year.

[Richard]

It might be worth you looking at www.schoolcpd.com - a UK based staff development system which tracks staff training / lesson observations / staff reviews

Schools can track the above while individual teachers can record their own career progression.

 

Its free too!!