Leveraging Educational Technology to Keep America Competitive

In October 2007, I was part of the Indiana University team with the Center for Evaluation and Education Policy (CEEP) that received a 3.1 million dollar contract from the Office of Education Technology in the Department of Education titled Leveraging Educational Technology to Keep America Competitive. This project focuses on examining how current and emerging technologies are being used in classrooms and how to prepare new teachers to best use these tools. Myself and Dr. Tom Brush are working on two main areas. The first area is a national study of preservice teacher education programs studying how they to prepare their gradautes use technology in their future K-12 classrooms. We are employing a three-phase mixed-methods study to answer the following questions:

1. What technology experiences are included in pre-service teacher education programs, and how do these compare to technology experiences supported by the research literature?
2. What technology experiences do teachers (a) find relevant and meaningful to their teaching and learning practices, and (b) integrate into their teaching and learning practices?
3. What are the similarities and differences between the technology experiences included in teacher education programs and the technology experiences teachers (a) find relevant and meaningful to their teaching and learning practices, and (b) integrate into their teaching and learning practices?

We have been documenting our efforts on our Levergaing Technology website. You can also visit AECT's Teacher Education Division Blog to listen to our discussion of the project online. Please note that there have been several changes in our research plan, but it might be interesting to see how it has evolved with all the feedback from experts and the Department of Education Ofice of Educational Technology. Before we begin our study, we need to get OMB approval. This takes at least 4 months so we plan on launching our study in September.

The second aspect of this contract is A Parent's Guide to the Internet. We are still working on this and I'll post a recent version of this in my next post. This project will be updating the 1997 version as quite a bit has changed since then...

Leveraging Educational Technology to Keep America Competitive

Preservice Technology Integration

So, I've been thinking a lot more about my technology integration course. What exactly are the objectives? What do I want my preservice teachers to be able to accomplish by time they leave the course. At IU, we have an interesting set-up of technology integration courses for teachers.

First, our students start out with the typical technology skills course (1 credit hour - w201), then move onto the technology integration course (1 credit hour - w301) which is coupled with their methods field experience course and then finally move onto the technology integration capstone course (1 credit hour - w401) which is coupled with their final field experience before they go into student teaching. This is a great approach because it builds up technology skills, then focuses on integration where they have a venue to try out ideas and talk about integration on a level that is more educationally and pedagogically aware.

We also have an Advanced Technology Integration Focus for our preservice teachers where they take w210 (Survey of Computer-Based Education - 3 credit hours) and w310 (Computer-Based Teaching Methods - 3 credit hours) and end with an online course w435 (Technology LEadership in K-12 - 3 credit hours). I taught w210 this past semester (http://www.indiana.edu/~cel/w210) and had some good and bad reactions.

One student commented in his blog that

"I was expecting more of a lesson of how to incoporate technology into the
classroom. But I feel odd about that subject because I feel as if the class
did not expose me to that subject; but you certainly showed up podcasts and
blogs and other stuff. So I feel like you did your job perfectly. But the
problem is, I think I already knew how to incorporate that type of stuff
into a class. Perhaps it was because of other classes in the School of Ed I
have taken. I also understand that this is the 1st course in a series and I
am looking forward to using these methods in the future." (http://pseib.blogspot.com/)

I guess I'm still confused on exactly what their notion is of integrating technology into a classroom. I had originally set-up this class to have them define their own notion of meaningful technology integration. I did not want to impose my judgements on them. However, perhaps with preservice teachers it's different. They need a little more guidance on what works in classrooms, what's thought of as innovative, what's going to be the most impressive, what's going to result in better learning... One of the difficulties with this was that I had students ranging from Freshman status to Graduate status, secondary social studies to elementary education majors. I tried to cater to each individual and then find topics that we could all engage in discussions on, and I think we succeeded for many of them. I think that this notion of individualized education plans should apply in our college classes as well. Therefore, my solution to this problem is to create learning contracts based on the NETS ISTE standards and their individual interests. We can create a customizable plan at the beginning of the semester noting the various topics they are interested in, learning goals/objectives, and then designing projects to complete these. This should also deal with the concerns over the lack of flexibility within project/lesson plan design. Examples should be provided, but their final project should be similar to the COATT portfolio, showing how they met the NETS standards with projects they created in this class.

I tried showing Web 2.0 tools, encourgaing them to look at examples that directly pertained to their subject area, but they still don't feel like they learned that much. Hmmm....if I start looking at the NETS ISTE standards, I think I can show them how much they have learned. Perhaps in the context of COATT, they can see that they know more than they think.

Others seemed to note that technology was not really taught in this class. I tried not to "teach" technology because technology is always changing. I think it's silly for us to spend class time on that when they could go out to YouTube to find videos that would help them with this.

So what are some projects that I can have them do as a class? Is this necessary? Can they just communicate via online? I also need to find out if I can make this class meet more than once per week. That may motivate students to participate more. I just had a brainstorm! If I pair up the preservice teachers with a K-12 student in their area, then I could use their lab time as a specified time to meet with me and discuss their progress on a weekly basis. That would be my office hours as well. I think that could work. I still need to think about projects to complete for this course. I'll get back to that later.

Preservice Technology Integration