Abstract
Teacher preparation programs are expected to prepare teacher candidates to integrate technology with instruction in meaningful ways to support PK-12 student learning (U.S. Department of Education, Office of Technology, 2017). Consequently, teacher candidates must experience technology in their teacher preparation coursework, including modeling by faculty, experiencing opportunities to practice integration through course assignments, and observing technology integration being implemented in K-12 classrooms. To accomplish these tasks, faculty must develop knowledge, skills, resources, and professional learning networks for themselves, including actively developing K-12 partnerships.
TopIntroduction
In December of 2016, a group of higher education faculty from teacher preparation programs across the U.S., participated in the Advancing Educational Technology in Teacher Preparation Innovation Summit, an event sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Technology (OET) and the White House. At this meeting, an addendum (OET, 2017), to the National Education Technology Plan [NETP] (OET, 2016a) was unveiled. This addendum, Reimagining the role of technology in higher education: A supplement to the National Education Technology Plan, specifically guides teacher preparation programs to teach pre-service teachers to meaningfully use technology to support student learning. “Teachers need to leave their teacher preparation programs with a solid understanding of how to use technology to support learning” (OET, 2016, p. 32). The NETP Addendum (2017, p. 66) provides four guiding principles for the use of educational technology in teacher preparation programs:
- 1.
Focus on the active use of technology to enable learning and teaching through creation, production, and problem solving.
- 2.
Build sustainable, program-wide systems of professional learning for higher education instructors to strengthen and continually refresh their capacity to use technological tools to enable transformative learning and teaching.
- 3.
Ensure pre-service teachers’ experiences with educational technology are program-deep and program-wide rather than one-off course separate from their methods courses.
- 4.
Align efforts with research-based standards, frameworks, and credentials recognized across the field.
An Advancing Educational Technology in Teacher Preparation Policy Brief provides additional detail (see https://tech.ed.gov/teacherprep/). This call to action is not new. In 2007, Zhao stated that faculty in teacher preparation programs must model the use of technology integrated instruction, with sound rationale and intentional strategies to integrate technology; Estes (2015) presented a similar call to action.
Webb (2011) established that school administrators expect beginning teachers to enter their first teaching position with the knowledge and skills to integrate technology as an enhancement to the K-12 instructional-learning process. Beginning teachers have also provided input. For example, in 2010, The National Center for Education Statistics reported that only 25% of teacher respondents reported that their undergraduate teacher education programs had a moderate or major impact on their ability to effectively integrate technology into instruction. In another study, Sutton (2011) surveyed teacher candidates regarding the technology training that they received in their teacher preparation program and found: 1) a disconnect between technology training and other aspects of teacher training, 2) a lack of content area training in relation to technology, and 3) inadequate attention to transfer opportunities. “Pre-service teachers need to be prepared to consider how technology can play a role in providing ongoing professional learning opportunities, engaging diverse learners, supporting student learning, and closing persistent achievement gaps” (OET, 2016b, p. 9).
Key Terms in this Chapter
T-PACK: An acronym for Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge, a framework that combines technology, pedagogy, and content knowledge for teachers to plan and teach effectively with technology.
e-MINTS: An acronym for Enhancing Missouri’s Instructional Network Teaching Strategies, a professional development model with four components: supporting high quality lesson design, promoting inquiry-based learning, creating a technology-rich learning environment and building community among students and teachers.
NTLC: The National Technology Leadership Coalition (NTLC) is a consortium of national teacher educator associations and national technology associations providing an annual National Technology Leadership Summit.
ISTE: An acronym for the International Society for Technology in Education, a not-for –profit organization that provides standards and criteria for what teachers need to teach and what students need to learn, as well as what content needs to be provided by a professional development programs in relation to educational technology.
Crowd Sourcing: The process of crowdsourcing involves seeking input from numerous individuals on a topic, with the idea that by gathering ideas from a large group of people the gathering of ideas will be comprehensive.
SITE: An acronym for the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education, an international association of individual teacher educators, and affiliated organizations of teacher educators in all disciplines, who are interested in the creation and dissemination of knowledge about the use of information technology in teacher education and faculty/staff development. SITE (is a society of the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE).
Office of Educational Technology: The Office of Educational Technology (OET) is within the Department of Education with the task of developing U.S. educational technology policy, establishing the vision for how technology can be used to transform teaching and learning and accessibility throughout K-12, higher education, and adult education.
SAMR: An acronym for the Substitution Augmentation Modification Redefinition Model for teachers to evaluate how they are incorporating technology into their instructional practice. SAMR is a four-level framework (substitution, augmentation, modification, and redefinition), through which technology use in a classroom can be viewed.
AACE: An acronym for the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education, an international educational and professional organization dedicated to the advancement of the knowledge, theory, and quality of learning and teaching at all levels with information technology.