ELON COLLEGE – Elon College has embarked on a one-year project to prepare students in its teacher education program to incorporate more technology into the classroom.
The $85,155 project is being financed with a grant from the U.S. Department of Education, the Alamance Area Education Consortium and the college.
“Teacher education programs are being faulted for not adequately preparing prospective teachers for the information age,” said Judith Howard, associate director of education and project coordinator. “National survey results indicate that teacher education faculty are not modeling the use of technology in their courses, and students are not transferring skills learned in the stand-alone technology courses to subsequent instruction in the field.”
Howard said Elon’s education department recognized that its methods courses, which all prospective teachers must take, needed more technology integrated into the curriculum. This fall, the department combined all the methods classes into one that being is taught by Howard, Anne Wooten, associate professor of education, and Deborah Thurlow, assistant professor of education.
Students in the class will develop project-based learning tasks. “They will identify a real-life problem, tie it into the curriculum and develop approaches to solving the problem. They will develop ways to get information and how to analyze that information,” Howard said. After the tasks are identified, faculty and students will go into Altamahaw-Ossipee, Grove Park, Eastlawn and Sylvan elementary schools to implement them.
A “community of learners” via online discussion forums also will be established. A class Web site will be developed and made available to other classrooms in the state and nation.
“We are giving students problem-solving skills,” Howard said. “The computer is a tool just like a textbook or encyclopedia. It will make sense when to use it.”
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