ISOF - NETs.Work

Get the Word Out!: Using Technology to
Build a Teaching and Learning Community for the NCATE Initiative

The challenge of meeting external standards related to the preparation of tomorrow’s teachers will be successfully won when all stakeholders in the effort become part of the process.

Objective: To demonstrate to college community (faculty and students) how to communicate information (Specifically, this project communicated the NCATE Standards to college-wide faculty as well as students in the Department)

Method: Use technology to build a teaching and learning community committed to preparing tomorrow’s teachers

Background
The purpose of the Generation II NetsWork Project 2001-2003 was to integrate digital video and other elements of instructional technology into an online component of a special education course. This was done successfully during the spring 2002 semester. By providing students with the opportunity to explore technology via their participation in an online course, and modeling the use of PowerPoint, students were indirectly taught how to use technology in assignments in other courses, at work, as they made presentations to their co-workers, and as some reported, at home as they used it to help their own children with their homework.

Students reported that they enjoyed the use of technology in the course. Technology was used as an instructional tool. The current project served to use technology as an instructional tool for a larger community of stakeholders in the teacher education process.

Overview
The University’s recent decision for its colleges’ departments of education to pursue NCATE accreditation has resulted in the MEC Education Departments’ assessment of its own practices as it relates to NCATE standards and best practices. Although the NCATE mandate and related responsibilities rests squarely on the shoulders of the education Department, the burden for preparing of tomorrow’s teachers is shared by liberal arts disciplines as well.

The Get the Word Out! Project is a technologically based, transdiciplinary conversation led by the Education Department that includes liberal arts faculty, teacher education candidates, and P-9 professionals. This learning community that is, Education and Liberal Arts faculty, P-9 professionals and teacher candidates are the key stakeholders in the movement to improve success of P-9 learners.

The use of technology in preparing teachers for tomorrow’s schools is a critical standard in NCATE’s conceptual framework. Initially, the project was geared at helping Liberal Arts and Education faculty incorporate the use of technology in their classes (especially since they represent a significant component of the preparation of our teachers. While some faculty expressed interest, they provided little actual follow up to those desires. Whether due to time constraints or insecurity with their own technological aptitude, this points to the need for practicing and prospective teachers (P-9 and higher ed) to have an earlier, intensive, comprehensive, interdisciplinary introduction and orientation to and engagement with technology. Preparing tomorrows teachers is a shared responsibility.

The project evolved to become an electronic portfolio of sorts that chronicles the development, performance and the effects of the Departments’ use of technology to promulgate NCATE’s philosophy and practices. In addition, NCATE’s expectations for the role of technology in teacher preparation programs is clear: “the unit’s conceptual framework(s) [must] reflect the unit’s commitment to preparing candidates who are able to use educational technology to help all students learn; it also provides a conceptual understanding of how knowledge, skills, and dispositions related to educational and information technology are integrated throughout the curriculum, instruction, field experiences, clinical practice, assessments, and evaluations”.

The project extends the NCATE’s expectations for teacher candidates to include key stake holders as used it technology to as a means of instruction for faculty, P-9 teachers, teacher candidates and P-9 to learn about NCATE, related professional organization standards.