Preparing Tomorrow's Teachers to use Technology Grant 
(Funded by the U.S. Department of Education)

Project Abstract

America's schools will need two million new teachers within the next decade. Recent North Carolina estimates suggests that as the number of students in the state and demand for smaller student-teacher ratios increase, the state education system will be forced to hire approximately 2000 new teachers over the next 3 years. These teachers must know their students and their content areas, and must have command of an array of pedagogical tools to ensure that all students learn. They must be able to use technology to support multiple approaches to teaching complex ideas in classrooms. They must be able to apply advanced technologies enabling students to interact with their content and with each other in a manner that promotes cooperative learning, critical thinking, communication skills, and reasoning power (Beyer, 1988; Ennis, 1989; Johnson & Johnson, 1990). What is more, they must be able to do these things in a non-discriminatory environment that takes into account student cognitive styles and in such a way that all students achieve the highest level of academic success possible (Hazari & Schnoor, 1999).

Majority of those new teachers will be recent graduates of colleges of education, the School of Education at Winston Salem State University (WSSU) inclusive. But, in a survey of new graduates of teacher education, the Office of Technology Assessment (1998) in the report, “Teachers and Technology: Making the Connection,” found that while more than half of them reported being prepared to utilize tutorials, games, word processing, and publishing applications; less than 10% felt competent to use multimedia and presentation packages, electronic network collaboration capabilities, or problem-solving applications.

There are several imperatives inherent in the need for and vision of the 21^st century teacher. First, higher education institutions must at least double the number of students who enter and successfully complete licensure requirements over the next five to ten years. Second, we must make sure that these teachers enter their profession equipped with the content knowledge and pedagogical skills to ensure a high level of achievement for all students. Third, they must be proficient in the integration of content knowledge, basic and advanced technologies, and constructivist pedagogies. Ensuring the effective use of technology in the classroom suggests other imperatives; simply providing more technology tools is not the answer. We must integrate technology across the teacher education curriculum so that new teachers have the requisite knowledge and skills to do the same within their content specialty areas. The first challenge in this regard is to provide teacher education faculty with opportunities to learn about technology and to infuse it into the teacher education curriculum. The second is to identify and, in many instances, design meaningful technology applications that enhance student learning in the academic disciplines (Jacobson, 1998). Finally, we must make clear that technology is for everyone, that all students can and must move beyond the "drill and practice" that often characterizes technology use with poor and minority children.

The Technology Infusion Project (TIP) provides a comprehensive and sustainable response to the referenced imperatives. Through this initiative, we will aggressively recruit new teacher education students; provide intensive, project-oriented faculty training, facilities, and partnerships that will lead to the full integration of technology across the teacher education curriculum; and freely disseminate our successes so that other teacher education programs benefit from them.  The goal of our PT3 grant (TIP), here at Winston Salem State, is rather straightforward. We wish to build and sustain significant improvements in our teacher education program, evidenced by (a) the numbers of students who enter, graduate, and subsequently receive initial licensure, (b) their ability to demonstrate a high level of proficiency in integrating content knowledge, basic and advanced technologies, and constructivist pedagogies to improve teaching and learning across the K-I2 curriculum, and (c) their placement in low-resource, high needs schools within our partnership and the Piedmont Triad.  Our primary focus is on faculty development, which we believe sincerely is the crucial enabler in the accomplishment of this goal. We fully expect that our efforts will result in higher student achievement and that, in the end, our successes will become our most productive recruitment tool.

TIP will provide training, facilities, partnerships, and rewards leading to the full integration of technology across the teacher education curriculum at Winston Salem State University.  It is expected that TIP will result in production of pre-service teachers proficiency in using advanced technologies to support instruction. They will demonstrate such proficiency via “electronic portfolios” and demonstrations before a panel of their peers, teachers, and faculty members who will assess their work. The live portfolio will double as a recruitment forum for public school partners and an evaluation of the effectiveness of the Teacher Education Program's efforts.