This report presents pilot-test results for a science professional development program featuring online, on-demand materials developed by the National Science Teachers Association. During the spring 2006 semester, 45 middle school teachers from three different school districts across the United States participated in a professional development program designed to facilitate content knowledge and skills in the area of Newtonian force and motion. Participants from one of the school districts experienced a full-day instructor-led workshop along with two web-based seminars with a content-area expert. This was followed by a 4-week period of time in which they had access to self-directed, online, on-demand instructional materials that included activities, information, simulations, examples, and practice with immediate feedback over the targeted outcomes. Participants from the two other school districts only had access to the online materials with no instructor-led experience. This report documents positive gains in achievement as well as levels of confidence in teaching the material within all of the professional development groups. Data about the use of specific features within the online material are included, as well as completion rates and attitude survey results. Recommendations for future study are also included.

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Prior research has demonstrated that the quality of moderation and management in online communities of practice is key to their successful support of learning. However, as communities grow in size and complexity, it becomes increasingly difficult for unaided experts to fully understand and take action in response to the activity of participants within them. Learning analytics has the potential to provide the support that community of practice leaders need to improve their performance. The National Science Teachers Association and U.S. Department of Education's Connected Educators project are exploring three approaches for managing forums to make them accessible and to synthesize the knowledge they generate: archiving, summarizing, and reorganizing. This paper describes manual heuristics for the first two of these, as well as the use of social network analysis to help develop algorithms to automate the third, community forum reorganization.

This chapter presents an overview of current electronic portfolio options available to practicing educators, emphasizing the different roles portfolios play within the professional development process. Available features within a variety of free and subscription web-based portfolio services are compared and the use of specific portfolio options within different professional development environments such as university graduate programs are profiled. Using a case study-like approach, the chapter details the use of the National Science Teachers Association’s (NSTA) Learning Center, a collection of resources available to teachers that includes a web-based professional development plan and portfolio tool. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the different ways in which professional organization resources like the NSTA’s PD Plan and Portfolio Tool can be used in the near future to continually improve the professional practice of educators.