I received a message this morning from a teacher I met a few months ago at a conference in New England. Here is part of the message.
…I am a technology integration specialist in a middle school in Maine. I will be teaching a course for a local private college next semester for pre-service k-8 teachers named “Technology in Education”. I’m playing around with the syllabus right now and was curious what you and maybe your blog and/or podcast community think are the most important concepts college students should know about the uses of technology in the classroom. What essential themes would you teach this course around?
I’d like to cast this out for conversation among the seven or eight people who read this blog. I figure that if you are reading this, then you’ve thought a bit about pre-service education.
I’ll start things with my own thoughts, coming from my unique angle on technology/information literacy. I call it contemporary literacy.
If I were teaching a class, whose goal it is to prepare teachers for contemporary information environment, I’d probably not include a lot of readings, and would probably include only one or two texts. After-all, I do write books.
The syllabus would essentially be a chronology of goals. On this day, you will develop knowledge and competencies in these areas. You will be able to…
It will then be the students’ responsibility to come in with some references to information sources on the topic, a written outline of the ideas they have collected, and evidence that those ideas are valid and relevant.
The bottom line is that teachers should learn to teach themselves within a networked, digital, and overwhelming information environment. Part of discussing their findings and conclusions during the class sessions, would be discussion the strategies that the students used to find the information and to validate and relvate them (new verb).
During the course, teams of two students would select one of the topics from the syllabus and prepare for the end of the course, a presentation, including multimedia support on that topic, including a bibliography and meta-report on the learning process.
What do you think?
Dave–I think you have more than 7-8 readers. Bloglines is showing that you now have 155 subscribers!
I’d like to throw in that the learn how to carry on discussions in a digital environment and be able to link to other people of similar interests. That is my two-cents from Jersey.
Jay
I think we spend one of the first class periods showing the class how to register with Blogliness, Flickr, Furl, Skype, Technorati, Wikipedia and a blog. Then, we say see you again in two weeks. I found that through total immersion in these tools I have learned so much. Then, once immersed, we have something to come back and discuss. We are ready to discuss implications for teachers and students.
David,
I’m very interested in the topic since I taught my first pre-service class last June. In my humble opinion, I think the students need to know about community. We need to change teaching from working in isolation to working in collaborative environments. I agree with Bmull that the teachers need to learn tools like Bloglines and Furl. The goal isn’t to learn the tools, but learn how to share and gain from others.
Next, the goal should always be to improve student learning. New teachers need to learn how they can communicate with parents, create motivating lessons, use technology to publish student work, and to automate the clerical work they need to do. Also, as you said teachers need to know about the “new†literacy and about Internet Safety for children. Each of those items took up a lot of my class time and online discussion.
I might return to write more about this, and I am very interested to hear what others have to say.
jim
I’m giving a workshop on just this topic tomorrow morning for math teachers. You can see it here. To the list of things in that workshop I would also add wikis, data storage at ourmedia.org and underscore again and again that all of this comes together to the habitual reflection fostered by regular blogging.
I believe you hit the nail on the head with this above statement Dave. Teachers teach ‘What they know’ so we need to teach teaches to be information literate. I believe this goes back to the educational term ‘Life long learning’ we need to teach pre-service teacher that we are in a state of continues change and just because a lesson was accurate this year, it might not be accurate next year, as information continues to change and grow.
As a technology teacher working in a K-12 environment, I would say the skill that needs to be most developed is the skill of finding information in a digital environment. I get between 5 and 15 e-mails a day with requests of “Can you help me find information on….†Or “Can you help me find a game on …..†teachers don’t even know where to begin to find this information and for many the thought of looking for it themselves on the internet is just way too overwhelming.
As I write this we have to also keep in mind that today’s pre-service teachers, if this is their first degree, were probably born between 1980 and 1985, making them part of the digital generation. They may already have the information literacy skills, but need to refine them in a way that they will work within the educational setting.
The other part I would add to the class is the brain research that has come out just in the last 5 years on how the digital generation’s brain has actually evolved do to the high input of digital media. We need to understand how today’s student’s brain acquires and stores information. Even for a high school student today, 30 minutes of ‘sit and get’ lecture is way to long to be inactive in the learning process.
My most important concepts for a K-8 pre-service teacher:
Contemporary Literacy (as Dave describes it)
Today’s Brain (With a focus on research less then 5 years old)
Activating an Inactive lesson (Using digital media to actively involve learners in the learning process)
Just my thought as I sit here with 1st graders who can log on a network by themselves, start Kid Pix, create a picture, save the picture, open a saved picture, and log off the network with very little guidance….all of these skills took a total of about 20 minutes of the first 6 weeks of school. Don’t tell me their brains aren’t wired differently. 🙂
Hello. I found myself in a very similar situation this past summer when I was hired to teach a graduate class at a local university – “Technology for Teachers”. I was given a blank slate to design the curriculum and some of my students were in the preservice category with no prior teaching experience. (My day job is teaching 8th grade American History in Liberty, Missouri.)
I tried to not focus on specific programs or applications, but rather the types of tools. For example, each student was required to create a blog to update during the course. Many of the students had never seen a blog when the class started and by the end of the class they were thinking of ways to incorporate it in their classrooms. There are so many programs and possibilites out there I think it is best to give them some direction in tools available and then let me customize it to their own situation. I do have my students work on a final project for the last week in which they create either a new lesson or modify an exisiting lesson they teach using several of the new technologies. I try to make the class an opportunity to expose teachers to as many new tools as possible. They will decide which ones they feel comfortable using and which fit their teaching style. The feedback from my first class was very positive and next week I will teach the course for the first time as an online class. I’m anxious to compare the online experience with the face to face class.
By the way, we use Dave’s book on 21st Century Literacy as the textbook for the class. Rock on Dave.
Eric Langhorst
http://www.liberty.k12.mo.us/~elanghorst
Jim,
Thanks for clarifying the point I made. I wsan’t trying to say that we needed to teach the tools for the sake of teaching the tools. We need to teach the tools so that they can be used to obtain and share information.
Jeff,
Do you have some good resources on hand concerning the brain research you mentioned?
We need to have ICT’s and tech integrated accross all literacy areas during preservice education. Makes sense that student teachers are shown practical ways that tech is used in all literacy areas….. IE: Language, Mathematics etc. This way we see a purpose for tech and teachers begin to see the need to have themselves up to scratch in these areas. Preservice teachers should be getting into this realm themselves, but I feel universities need to demonstrate how it all works (tech in different curriculum areas).
Brett
blog.brettmoller.com
One thing that has been implied but I do not believe has been explicitly stated so far is context. Most of the people who read this blog have become proficient in Web 2.0 tools because there was something that they wanted to learn about — mostly Web 2.0 tools. We went into the blogosphere, subscribing to the writers we want to pay attention to with our brand new aggregators, tracking the Wikipedia and perhaps even sifting through the histories of articles and definitions, started our own del.icio.us accounts and then used them as a springboard into other people’s digital libraries, and subscribed to them. Totally cool, we thought.
However, I fear that if we take college students into these tools, without some specific and relevant questions to answer or problems to solve, then they may seem cool to them, but the skills will be strictly academic. I think these students should be presented with a problem. For example, you need a multimedia presentation that will teach (some concept) perfectly. Then start with a discussion of the problem to create some grounding in the elements of the problem, then introduce them to Wikipedia, then Technorati, then bloglines, then…
The second penny I would add is a springboard off of something that Jeff Utecht said. He said that “They may already have the information literacy skills…”. In talking with teenagers and from what some of the research says, I think that kids these ages are technology literate, but not necessarily information literate. See Study Shows some Teens not as Web-savvy as Parents. I think that we should help them to develop these skills by isolating out established skills, forcing them to rely on the fully networked, digital, and overwhelming information environment. For instance, in the first stage of their research, they are not allowed to use any resources that have been in any way filtered by traditional publishing or formal jurying. After the first night’s discussions of what they found in the online conversation, then they are allowed to find supporting information, but only digital. In their first drafts of their multimedia presentation, allow no words. Only images and sound. They have to express their ideas with media other than the written word.
Again, we get it, because we learned these tools to solve our own problems. Pre-service teachers, and all learners for that matter, need to be going into learning experiences to accomplish a goal that they identify with.
2 more cents worth.
I see where Dave is coming from here in the latest comment. I guess I was thinking the same way just didn’t express it so well. Preservice teachers need to be shown the porblem solving skills that are needed for effectivly using tech. When they hit schools the older staff look to them for the “tech know how” and can easily be dissapointed when the educational value of the tech they are using is not worth while. I recently had a great professional development moment with a more experienced educator who does not have the tech skills but has the educational ‘know how’. I showed an example of a students video presentation to this educator, when he saw the tech he got excited (because he could see it would engage the learner etc), then he listed off at least 10 ideas that he thought should have been used to make it a more valuable learning experience for students. We need to be showing pre-service teachers how the tech skills they have need to be molded into solving the greatest problem of teaching – being effecient and effective educators of students.
Cheers,
Brett
I think the critical issue is that technology is just a tool. The reason we use technology in school is to teach curriculum content. Your pre-service teachers need to focus on lesson design. Having a problem to solve is a great way to approach this. Asking them to require higher levels of thinking in their lesson design is important. Sometimes that is a matter of defining the task with the right question. Problems can often be solved by creating original products that are a result of significant analysis and evaluation. The secondary obligation is to provide the support they need to use the technology tool to respond to the problem.
Your students may want to read some of the work of Jamie McKenzie and also Bernajean Porter. Both have lots of material on-line. Also consider Jerry Valentine. Higher levels of thinking also takes them back to Bloom.
Computers are super heros or super villians. They have great power, but can be used for either good or evil. Design strong activities and they effectively support your instructional goals. Neglect good lesson design and they are an expensive tool to squander time and money.
That’s my 2 cents worth.
Rick
I’d like to conceptually link this back to the earlier post about innovation. What many of you describe is showing the teachers the technology tools, and then taking them through a process of discovering ways to integrate the tools into their teaching (or changing their teaching through the use of the tools). In other words, you provide teachers the opportunity to be innovative in their instructional practice. That is the core of technological literacy – the innovation and invention, not the simple use of the tools themselves. That is what separates many kids from many adults when it comes to the use of technology. Adults see a particluar tool with a particular application, where kids see a medium to be adapted and transformed.
The challenge I’m seeing in many districts is the conflict between standards and innovation. If you’re only allowed to use a standardized, research-proven curriculum, and use only standardized, district-approved hardware and software, it’s hard to find space to try innovative teaching with new technologies. And if the teachers can’t innovate, it’s hard for them to teach innovation to the kids.
And that’s way too many uses of the word “innovate” in a single comment!
Sorry I got to the table a bit late. I have spelled out on my blog http://21stcenturylearning.typepad.com/blog/ what “I think are the most important concepts college students should know about the uses of technology in the classroom. And what essential themes would you teach this course around?” I do this from the perspective of what I actually teach in my preservice graduate and undergraduate technology education courses at W&M. I tried to be concrete and cover the questions in all three posts Davbid has laid out for us here.
Check it out and let me know what you think.
Sheryl
ConnMc says above, “That is the core of technological literacy – the innovation and invention, not the simple use of the tools themselves. That is what separates many kids from many adults when it comes to the use of technology. Adults see a particluar tool with a particular application, where kids see a medium to be adapted and transformed.” and “if the teachers can’t innovate, it’s hard for them to teach innovation to the kids.”
I think I’m looking at this in a slightly different context. I think that our students who are truely “digital natives” or “milleniums” or whatever you want to call them, don’t need to be taught to innovate, and I don’t think they “see technology as a medium to be adapted and transformed.” I don’t think that they “see technology.” It’s just how life is to them, an every day part of living. They don’t think about using technology and when to apply the tool and which tool to use, they just do it! I once asked an art student how he could look at a face and then draw it with such accuracy. He replied, “What do you mean, ‘How do I do it?’! I just do it!” I think that’s the very thing that separates us from our students. We are looking and how and how to teach the how and they are just doing it.
We, who are digital immigrants think of technology as “a thing” that you must learn to use. At a recent conference I attended (eLearning Symposium [http://www.elearningsymposium.org], Rochester, NY) Will Richardson (http://www.weblogg-ed.com) talked about “losing our digital accent” by living and doing what our students are already doing. I think that is what the focus for pre-service instruction should be and many of the comments here have alluded to this as well. These adult students should be immersed in doing what our K-12 students are doing everyday – blogging, RSS, wiki’s, furl, Skype, etc. Authentic integration, if you will.
Being the person who originally asked Dave to get this discussion going, I thought it would be nice to throw out some of the ideas I was pondering. I’m glad to see many of the ideas I had for the course were affirmed by many of you. I am thrilled to see the wealth of responses that have come from this community! I never dreamed I would get the feedback I received thus far and look forward to see where this all goes.
My thoughts for the course…
Information Literacy (as Dave describes it)
Good lesson design using technology (not just using it for technology sake)
How to Share and Learn from others using Technology (I think the current threads in Dave’s blog show this tremendously well!)
Activating(stolen from Jeff Utecht) Lessons using interactive applets, multimedia content, primary source information, and other Web 2.0 tools.
Internet Safety
I agree with Dave that todays students have the technology skills but do not have the information skills they need to move forward. Developing these skills will be the major focus of the course. In the development of these skills the students will use many of the tools that have been addressed in earlier posts. The next big focus will be developing lessons that use technology to impact learning. I really hope to create a crop of teachers that will not force students to watch 20 PowerPoint presentations on the same topic.
Teachers need to develop information literacy skills but they must also use these skills to create lessons that do more than basic regurgitation of facts and do not set students up to plaigarize. Technology is used too frequently to make learning look “flashy” without ensuring that each student develop any deep learnings. I want to open my students eyes to the viewpoints of people like Larry Cuban (google him and you’ll find lots of his rants against technology use in schools) and how to create a classroom where he has no complaints.
Finally, I want my students to leave the course realizing the power of the web community. They need to realize the power of using the web to provide a larger audience for student work. When teachers use the web to post student work it creates a demand of quality that many students will not reach if the teacher is the only other person who will see their work. The power of blogs like this one is amazing. I will probably show them how this blog made their course better. This is a perfect example of what jimw mentioned about creating a sense of community.
I think I’ve given more than my 2¢ worth. Thank you all who have given me such great feedback!
Mike