ELON COLLEGE – Elon College has received a $486,183 grant from the U.S. Department of Education to fund a project designed to increase the use of technology by future elementary and middle school teachers. When combined with funding from Elon and its partner institutions, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, N.C., and Barton College, Wilson, N.C., the total project cost is more than $1 million.
The grant is part of a three-year $128 million federal program titled “Preparing Tomorrow’s Teachers to Use Technology (PT3).” President Bill Clinton announced the 122 grantees in this year’s program June 3 in his weekly radio address. The goal is to train one million teachers across the country in the use of technology. The Elon College grant is one of only three made this year in North Carolina.
Over the next three years, faculty and students majoring in education at Elon College, Wake Forest and Barton College will develop technology-enhanced learning units that will be used by student teachers in classrooms in three associated school districts in North Carolina, the Alamance-Burlington School System, the Winston-Salem/Forsyth School System and the Wilson School System.
These Web-based curriculum units will have special features, collectively called Universal Design, to accommodate students who have special learning needs, including learning disabilities, socio-economic disadvantages and limited English language proficiency.
Judith Howard, associate professor of education at Elon College, author of the grant and project director, says the project builds on work Elon faculty members did last year with funding from a first-phase, $41,000 Department of Education grant. During the past academic year, Elon students and faculty members worked in partnership with the Alamance Area Education Consortium to develop technology-enhanced project-based units, called “WebQuests,” and to use them in area schools.
“Using funding from this new grant, education programs at Elon, Wake Forest and Barton will take the lead in training teachers to make effective use of technology in classroom instruction,” says Howard. ” Our goal is to permanently change teacher training in a way that emphasizes use of technology as a tool for thought. Our technology-enhanced curriculum will make computer instruction accessible to all students and will have an immediate impact on students in North Carolina. Over the three-year granting period, the teaching units we develop will be published and made available to teachers and students throughout the United States – and around the world.”
During the next academic year, faculty members will begin work with future teachers to begin developing the teaching units. Then during the summer of 2001, teams of students, faculty members and K-12 teachers will hold a summer institute at Wake Forest University’s International Center for Computer Enhanced Learning (ICCEL). Student teachers will begin field testing the units in schools during the 2001-2002 academic year.
Site coordinators for the project are Deborah Thurlow, assistant professor of education at Elon College; Ann Cunningham, assistant professor of instructional design in the department of education at Wake Forest University; and Barbara Mize, associate professor of education at Barton College.