ABSTRACT
As teaching evolves, teacher education must keep up. This book examines systemic reforms that incorporate new technology to improve any teacher education program.
While there are books that address the integration of technology into teaching curricula, very few address the process for teacher education faculty and the systemic reform of a teacher education program. Integrating Information Technology into the Teacher Education Curriculum: Process and Products of Change provides practical examples and suggestions for teacher education departments striving to integrate new technologies into their curriculum. It will help in the effort to motivate faculty to make utilizing new technology a natural strategy for the teachers they are educating. It describes the creation of Design Teams at Brigham Young University’s McKay School of Education (funded by a PT3 grant) and how these teams worked to successfully reconfigure the school’s teacher preparation curricula.
Integrating Information Technology into the Teacher Education Curriculum examines:
- how to compose and create a curriculum design team—including both teacher education and content-specific methods instructors
- training and collaboration opportunities that focus on the infusion of technology
- how to facilitate alignment among a university, cooperating school districts, the State Office of Education, and other available teacher preparation programs
- specific case examples of the redevelopment of teacher education courses by the instructors who teach them
- the process of changing a technology course required by the teacher education program
- the process of extending grant activities to the university’s partner school districts and the State Office of Education
Preparing tomorrow’s teachers to use technology in schools is a complex endeavor requiring the infusion of technology into curriculum and instructional practices at all levels of the pre-service program. In many early teacher education programs, prospective teachers took a computer literacy class separate from content methods classes and rarely engaged in real collaboration on how schoolteachers could integrate technology into authentic learning experiences. By focusing merely on how to use computers, technology training failed by not addressing how to teach students more effectively using a variety of technological tools. What teachers need to know most is how to teach content more effectively. Technology integration should cause teachers to develop different perspectives through rethinking teaching and learning. Teaching with technology causes teachers to confront their established beliefs about instruction and their traditional roles as classroom teachers.
