March 11, 2021 3 min read
Success Story: Archbishop Hoban High School
Industry:
Solution:
Shifting to Online Professional Development Tracking Saves Educators Valuable Time
The Scenario
Archbishop Hoban High School is a private Catholic high school in Akron, Ohio, serving over 800 students. The school currently employs 60 teachers, counselors, and administrators. In 2017, in an effort to streamline the process of tracking professional development hours for licensed staff, the school sought to implement an online professional development tracking system.
The Challenge
Prior to 2017, the school was not using any type of online software to track professional development. The school was using forms from the state, but it was a paper and pencil process to manually keep track of professional development hours for each teacher in the building. In addition, administrators wanted the teachers to have more responsibility and better access to tools that would enable them to keep track of their own professional development hours for license renewal.
The Solution
The Vector PD Tracking Solution (formerly TeachPoint) helps busy administrators plan, manage, and track professional development activities, including managing educator recertification credits. Vector PD Tracking’s license tracking feature assists educators in associating their PD activities with specific state licensure requirements for maintaining and renewing their license. It allows teachers to monitor their own progress toward license recertification credit requirements and to generate a PD transcript documenting all of their completed activities and credits. Vector PD Tracking also provides administrators with detailed reports to monitor progress across their school or district.
At Archbishop Hoban High School, educators are using Vector PD Tracking to track PD hours associated with school-hosted PD events, faculty meetings, professional learning communities, and PD activities completed outside of the school. Tom Hottinger, Technology Integration Specialist, shared that with the Vector PD Tracking Solution, teachers no longer have to set up an appointment with a dedicated staff member to determine if they have enough hours for licensure renewal. The Local Professional Development Committee chairperson, while still in charge of licensure renewal for the school’s faculty and staff, no longer has to manually keep track of hours for each teacher.
In addition to tracking PD hours and license tracking, Vector PD Tracking also includes features for creating events, managing registration and attendance, gathering attendee event feedback, generating and distributing certificates of attendance, and approving out-of-district PD event requests from educators.
The Results
Hottinger explained that one of the things administrators and staff value most about the Vector PD Tracking Solution is the time they’ve saved by moving to a digital system. It used to take a lot of time to manually calculate hours for teachers, and now they can simply look at their information online, in one central location. In addition, administrators no longer need to worry about losing files or hunting through paperwork to keep track of who needs to renew their license each year. Administrators can quickly see a detailed report showing where all of their educators are in the license renewal process.
“One of our goals was to put the teachers back in charge of their licensure renewal,
and the Vector PD Tracking Solution has certainly helped us achieve that.”
Tom Hottinger
Technology Integration Specialist
