Projects

Linking Teacher Education Pedagogy to Digital Resources
2000 to 2003

CCT conducted a three-year evaluation of a multi-institution effort to facilitate changes in teacher education so that future teachers can better employ content-specific uses of technology in their disciplines. The underlying premise was that technology is changing the way many academic disciplines are conceptualized and that these advances are also transforming the ways in which content is taught, both in teacher education and in K-12 schools.

The project pursued four major activities:

  1. The National Technology Leadership Initiative (NTLI). As part of the NTLI, project staff collaborated with national teacher and teacher education organizations in mathematics, science, English, and social studies to facilitate policy initiatives relating to the use of technology in teacher education. Specific activities included the identification and development of guidelines for the preparation of teachers in discipline-specific uses of technology in each content area, the development of educational technology session strands and workshops at annual meetings, and the establishment of technology committees, and other initiatives.
  2. Digital Resource Teams. The project brought together a core group of faculty from a small number of teacher education programs who work together in discipline-based teams to develop and implement technology-enhanced activities for methods courses in the core content areas. The work of the Digital Resource Teams was designed to facilitate the integration of content-specific uses of technology into teacher education programs and to inform national teacher education policy initiatives.
  3. CITE Journal. In collaboration with the Association for the Education of Teachers in Science (AETS), the Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators (AMTE), the Conference on English Education (CEE), the National Council for the Social Studies College and University Faculty Assembly (CUFA), and the Society for Information Technology in Teacher Education (SITE), the project is publishing an online journal. The journal is intended to provide a new venue of interaction among teacher education programs about the use of technology in the four core content areas.
  4. NetSeminars. In collaboration with the Concord Consortium, the project conducted online seminars on the use of technology in teacher education for faculty from teacher education programs across the U.S.

Employing a variety of methods, including interviews, surveys, observations, and document analyses, CCT staff worked with the project team to document project activities and to assess their impact on the participating professional organizations, teacher education faculty and programs, and K-12 teacher education students.

This project was housed at the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia and was supported by a Catalyst Grant from the Preparing Tomorrow's Teachers to Use Technology Program at the U.S. Department of Education.

STAFF

Louisa Anderson
Patrick Carrigg