What is Educator Profiency?

Over the past several weeks, we have been working on our school district technology plan, which is required by our state. Every district must put together a technology plan, which covers three years. We looked at the previous plan we had in place and took a look at the goals of the plan to see the progress we were making. We then worked on the next steps by writing new goals and coming up with action plans on how they were going to be met. I'm pretty sure having the plan is somehow related to some type of funding we get from the state, but I can't say for sure. Anyway, the group I was working with dealt with the topic of Educator Proficiency. We had to write, as part of the plan, how we were going to improve educator proficiency when it comes to technology and computer use.

What is educator proficiency as it relates to technology? We had a hard time defining this. Did it deal with simple management tasks like answering email and completing attendance and report cards online? Or, is there another component of this dealing with integrating technology into the curriculum effectively. If this is true, how do you measure educator proficiency? Is there a set of skills that you can simply check off? Do the skills needed for a first or second grade teacher vary from those of high school teachers? I think the answer to many of these questions is yes. If I judge this proficiency of the teachers I work with based simple management tasks related to technology, they are all proficient for the most part. If I start looking deeper at their technology use as it relates to instruction, many are not even close. These are many teachers who rarely integrate technology into their lessons. I'm not going to get into the "why not" part, but in some cases their reasons are understandable.

I do wonder about the educator proficiency levels of other teachers. What about the teachers at your school? Would you say they are proficient? Are you? What is proficient? I'd be interested in the tasks you feel teachers need to be able to do to be proficient. Comments welcome on this one.