Preparing Future Teachers to be Connected Educators

Friends,

pixabay.com

I have a challenge and I am turning to my PLN to try to address it.

As you know, I teach Instructional Technology at the University of Northern Iowa.  We teach both undergraduate (future teachers) and graduate (present teachers) about how to use technology to support learning.  It is much more than technology.  It is about building a mindset to use teaching/learning strategies that optimize the opportunities available through technology.

We need to develop Connected Educators.  Our undergraduates are connected through social media, but they don't see how this can be used for a professional purpose.  They are unaccustomed to connecting with people around the world to learn from other practitioners.

Our challenge: We are trying to trying to develop learning activities where they will actually engage with other educators through social media. It has to be something more than connecting with other students in the class because they see them face-to-face a couple of times per week. It needs to be more than following hashtags.  Experiencing a globally collaborative project is good, but I am looking at changing a mindset. It needs to be something where they are experiencing this type of connection in such a way that it carries on into their professional lives.

This is where I am calling upon the greater knowledge base of the many. YOU.

What do you do with your students and teachers?  How do you, as a connected educator, connect with other professionals as part of your daily routine.  What are some suggestions that you might have for activities/experiences that we might use with our future and present teachers to foster them toward being Connected Educators?

Thank you for your response.

Leigh Zeitz

Please forward this to your colleagues or others you believe would have an idea about this.

Teacher Education: USING technology is Not Enough, MODEL it.

How do teacher educators use technology?

Many of faculty use the BlackBoard content management system for posting grades, emailing their students, providing copies of their PowerPoint presentations and provide assignment pages for students to better understand what is expected in class.

They are USING technology but how are they updating their students' (future teachers) ideas about what learning opportunities can be made possible using technology? How will these future teachers teach differently than they would have because of this technology application? 

The Apple Classroom of Tomorrow research yielded the 5 Stages of Teaching with Technology. These 5 stages include:

1. Entry - Teachers learn to use a new technology.
2. Adoption - Teachers use technology to support traditional instruction.
3. Adaptation - Teachers integrate new technology into traditional classroom practice.
4. Appropriation - Teachers focus on cooperative, project-based and interdisciplinary work - incorporating technology as needed and one of many tools.
5. Invention - Teachers discover new uses for technology tools and allow student to select between the tools.

The applications listed above fit into the Adoption mode of these 5 stages. This does not foster change. We MUST look beyond adopting technology into our curricula. We need to MODEL using technology to provide participatory learning activities in our classes. This requires at working at least at the Adaptation level.

I recently shared a social media video, Social Media Revolution 2, with my colleagues. That email was the inspiration of this posting. (I will specifically address this video in a later posting.) It shares the dramatic changes that social media is creating in our world and underlines how we need to integrate social media into our educational curriculum. 
One of my colleagues suggested that CMS programs like Blackboard will allow us to "mimic some social media but have the advantage of a controlled environment." This is true. Blackboard provides chatrooms, areas for discussion and places to post podcasts or other links to the web. But are they being used in ways that foster student-centered learning? Will their teacher candidates use these learning experiences as a model for creating stimulating activities for the future students?

One of my colleagues pointed out that some people JUST MODEL technology and never integrate the technology into the teaching/learning process.

The most important aspect of using technology in teacher education is modeling new methods for learning that will mold the teacher candidates' perspective on teaching.
What do you think?

Z

photo: flickr.com/GoodImages

Is Teacher Education Addressing the Needs of Future Teachers?

How do we effect change in our schools if our Teacher Education programs just keep doing more of the same? We talk about changing the learning environments of our schools, but where is the paradigm changing in our Teacher Education institutions?  A new set of standards (INTASC) are being released to guide teacher education programs, but will it make difference?

Teachers tend to teach the way they were taught. Learning experiences will have a greater effect on a teacher's teaching style than all the textbooks in the world. We can't fully appreciate a different learning experience unless we personally experience that experience. New teachers won't teach differently in their classrooms unless they have learned in a different manner and found it to be a positive experience. In short, we won't see change in our schools until we change how we prepare new teachers.

Last week I attended the School Administrators of Iowa (SAI) conference in Des Moines as a representative of our Iowa Technology and Education Connection (ITEC) organization.  I spoke with scores of administrators who told me that they are in the process of exploring and/or implementing a  1-to-1 computer learning environment. When I asked them how they were going to change their curriculum and pedagogical strategies so that the technology-enriched environment would actually make a change in how their students learned, most of them chuckled and said "We're still trying to figure that out."

Technology doesn't make the difference.  It provides the opportunities for education to be different. It is truly the teaching/learning strategies that make the difference.  But if we haven't defined the teachers' knowledge, skills and attitudes that are needed to successfully support a different technology-enriched learning environment, how can we provide a preservice teaching program to address these needs?

A Teacher Education program needs to identify what skills and tools need to be mastered to effectively work in a 1-to-1 learning environment and then they need to teach/use those methods in the classes they teach.  It's as simple as that.

I made a drastic change in the way I taught my Emerging Instructional Technology course this summer.  I have spoken on it at ISTE '10, but haven't blogged on it yet. It changed the way I plan to teach all of my courses and such an insight into how learning can be different is something that all teacher education professors should acquire.

This posting is part of the ongoing self-inquiry I am going through to become a better teacher. You might remember my first posting, How Do I Move to an Inquiry-Based Form of Teaching/Learning?

What are your ideas about this?  Do you know a source for finding/identifying the necessary knowledge/skills/attitudes/tools for optimizing a technology-rich learning environment?

What do you think?

Z

photo:http://illinoiseducationassociation.org/