Importance of Technology Leadership for Technology Integration: Gender and Professional Development Perspective

Arumugam Raman,Raamani Thannimalai

doi:10.1177/2158244019893707

Abstract

Technology leadership is being redesigned to accelerate technology integration in schools to develop and sustain the skills needed to produce skilled manpower. Previous studies showed that the factors that prevented leaders and teachers from integrating information and communication technologies (ICT) in schools are lack of ICT training, teacher ICT competency, and access to ICT resources. This shows that there is a gap in technology integration in schools. This study aims to identify the importance of technology leadership for technology integration based on gender and professional development. This is a quantitative study using cross-sectional design. A total of 90 respondents were selected by systematic random sampling from 190 national secondary schools. The importance and performance matrix analysis revealed that professional development had high performance and was an important variable in the prediction of teachers’ technology integration, but gender was not. Thus, school management should give priority to digital age learning culture and digital citizenship constructs to accelerate teachers’ technology integration in schools.

Highlights

The rapid advancement of technology, especially in Industrial Revolution 4.0 (IR 4.0), is influencing every aspect of our lives including leaderships and education settings across the world (Schwab & Davis, 2018)
This study found that there is no positive significant relationship between the five constructs of technology leadership and professional development (PP) with teachers’ technology integration
Metcalf (2012) found that principals were less prepared in terms of visionary leadership

Summary

Introduction

The rapid advancement of technology, especially in Industrial Revolution 4.0 (IR 4.0), is influencing every aspect of our lives including leaderships and education settings across the world (Schwab & Davis, 2018). School leadership preparatory training should include technology to produce future-ready school principals who can lead teachers and students, as learning experiences become virtual and ubiquitous (Aldowah et al, 2017; Esplin, 2017). According to the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) report, only 50% of teachers said that the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) for teaching was included in their initial training, and many agreed that they still require more professional development to master advanced ICT skills (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2019). It is evident that there is a gap in technology integration among teachers and school leaders who were not skilled to manage technology integration at schools, for example, many teachers in Malaysia faced challenges implementing Learning Management Systems like the Frog Virtual Learning Environment (Cheok &Wong, 2016)

Literature Review

Findings

Discussion and Conclusion