Abstract
The Advancing the Development of Educators in Pennsylvania through Technology Training (ADEPTT) consortium, representing three public universities located in rural, economically disadvantaged communities, received 1.7 million dollars from the U.S. Department of Education to implement a model for infusing Instructional Technology throughout the Teacher Preparation Curriculum. To achieve this, we are developing the appropriate competencies and related infrastructure necessary to promote collaboration and encourage active learning approaches for our faculty and pre-service teachers, facilitate the modeling of technology-based learning strategies and support student applications of Instructional Technology to teaching. A web-based electronic portfolio will allow students to preserve and showcase their efforts and accomplishments. At the core of our strategy is the infusion of eleven key competencies throughout our pre-service teacher education core curriculum and the following teacher education programs: Spanish, Secondary Social Science Education, Elementary and Early Childhood Education, Music, Mathematics, Physics, Physical Science and Geography.
The problem we are addressing is that teachers teach the way they were taught. Unless future teachers are prepared to use information technology, another generation of teachers will lack these eleven key competencies. Activities proposed to address the problem are 1) campus wide curriculum change throughout the consortium’s teacher preparation programs, 2) training faculty who supervise student teachers to use the eleven key competencies in a student centered teaching and learning environment, 3) providing role models for pre-service teachers through enriched field experiences with an emphasis on two-way videoconferencing, 4) establishing teaching circles which connect pre-service teachers more closely to faculty and cooperating teachers for mutual support and collaboration and 5) providing updated infrastructure to enable students and faculty to work collaboratively in a networked, multi-media environment that is essential for the digital age.
Outcomes
will include course and syllabi revisions, student portfolios, additional
staff to support the transition, an up-graded infrastructure provided by
the consortium as match, and some 325 faculty and more than 1,500 new
teachers per year who are able to effectively teach with higher level
technology skills in a student centered environment.
