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Subject: it-fyi: Project Trains Teachers to Use Technology (NY Times on th
Date: Wed, 15 Sep 1999 09:55:02 -0500
September 15, 1999
By PAMELA MENDELS
Project Trains Teachers to Use Technology
If all goes according to plan, by this time next year veteran teachers and
teachers-in-training across the country will be able to log on to a new Web
site and view demonstrations of tech-savvy peers putting computers to use in
the classroom.
The idea behind the project, to be carried out by a group of colleges and
other institutions under the direction of the University of Northern Iowa in
Cedar Falls, is simple. Researches hope to identify good examples of
classroom technology use, tape teachers as they employ the methods, add
footage of teachers explaining the techniques -- and then post the results
on a free Web site. With any luck, teachers who use the site will get
guidance on using technology as an educational tool and begin emulating what
they have learned.
"I think if we can provide educators with easily accessible strategies and
techniques involving technology to help students learn more and better, they
will use them," said William P. Callahan, associate dean of the college of
education at the University of Northern Iowa.
That is certainly the hope of officials at the U.S. Department of Education,
which is backing the project as part of a new federal effort to train
teachers in technology use.
Late last month, the Department of Education announced that it had awarded
about $75 million in grants to the initiative as well as to 223 other
projects in its new Preparing Tomorrow's Teachers to Use Technology program.
Linda Roberts, director of the Office of Educational Technology at the
Department of Education, characterized the federal effort as a "very major
new grant program." She said she hopes it will go a long way toward solving
a problem facing the teaching profession: many teachers are untrained in how
to use computers for educational purposes, even though computers have now
flooded classrooms.
The lack of training was driven home recently in a survey, conducted by
Market Data Retrieval, an educational market research firm, that found that
61 percent of teachers polled felt at best only "somewhat prepared" to
integrate technology into classroom instruction. The study also found little
difference between older teachers and those new to the profession.
The news was not a shocker to Roberts. She said there is a mistaken
assumption that because younger teachers were raised with computers, they
are necessarily more comfortable with technology as a teaching tool. But
just because a teacher can use a computer for word processing, she said,
does not mean that person has a good idea how to use the computer as a
teaching aid.
At the same time, Roberts said, a number of teacher training programs have
failed to effectively teach these pedagogical skills. One reason, she said,
is that college education departments often lack the resources of
engineering or business schools and simply have not had the money to invest
in upgrading computer equipment. Another is that some faculty members may
themselves be unfamiliar with technology as a teaching tool, and are unable
to teach those skills to the incoming crop of teachers.
Whatever the explanation, education officials believe that they are
confronting a demographic reality that makes the need for technology
training particularly pressing over the next few years. Within a decade,
according to the Department of Education, the nation will be hiring 2.2
million new teachers as the retirement of the Baby Boom generation of
teachers and the push to reduce class sizes come into play. The expected
turnover in teachers, combined with the fact that school districts in recent
years have begun spending billions of dollars on hardware and software,
means that now is the time to push technology training, Roberts said.
The grants are paying for a wide variety of projects. The University of
Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, for example, will use its $175,000
grant with other partners to begin assessing what it needs to do to upgrade
its technology preparation programs. The grant will pay for, among other
things, a pilot program in how to train the professors who teach future
teachers in technology use, according to Susan C. Malone, the project
director.
Researchers at the University of Virginia and a consortium of other
institutions, meanwhile, are the recipients of a $2 million grant to develop
ways to make collections of primary source material on the Internet useful
for classroom teachers. James M. Cooper, a professor of education at the
University of Virginia who is serving as principal investigator of the
project, said the university has at least four such collections, including a
detailed database of civil war letters, newspaper articles and other
records.
The hope is to plumb that database for lesson plans and other useful
classroom material, so that, for example, an eighth grade history teacher
might be able to construct a lesson around asking students to explore the
source documents to discover how the opposing sides responded to Lincoln's
Emancipation Proclamation.
Not all educators agree with the training program, launched by an
administration that has made a major push to put technology in the classroom
through such programs as the $2.25 billion E-rate initiative to give schools
and libraries low-cost telecommunications services.
Lowell W. Monke, an assistant professor of education at Grinnell College and
the co-author of a critique, to be published next year, of classroom
Internet use, says that if there are to be computers in the classroom,
teachers should be trained in their use. However, Monke questions the whole
effort to use technology for teaching, and thinks the billions being poured
into it are dollars spent on a misguided effort that puts more faith in
machinery than human beings.
He thinks training efforts would be better focused on instructing teachers
how to work directly with students and how to handle the host of problems
young learners face, from learning disorders to violence. "It's the last
thing I'd spend money on," he said of the teacher technology training
grants. "I'd sell the technology, so I'd have more money to train teachers
how to work with kids."
But Roberts responds that technology in the classroom is inevitable, and
that the training seeks to mold teachers able to put the machinery to its
best use. "I think these grants will have an impact on better preparing
teachers overall," she said.
The EDUCATION column is published weekly, on Wednesdays. Click here for a
list of links to other columns in the series.
Related Sites
These sites are not part of The New York Times on the Web, and The Times has
no control over their content or availability.
University of Northern Iowa College of Education
(http://www.uni.edu/coe/)
Office of Educational Technology
(http://www.ed.gov/Technology/)
Preparing Tomorrow's Teachers to Use Technology program
(http://www.ed.gov/teachtech/)
E-rate program
(http://www.sl.universalservice.org/)
Grinnell College
(http://www.grinnell.edu/)
University of Southern Mississippi
(http://www.usm.edu/)
Curry School of Education at The University of Virginia
(http://curry.edschool.virginia.edu/)