Elon University's teacher education programs have pledged to pursue new principles for the integration of technology in teacher education defined by the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Educational Technology.
In December, Elon University’s teacher education programs committed to pursuing four principles for the integration of technology. These principles came out of recent work led the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology. The four principles are as follows:
1. Focus on the active use of the 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 courses separate from their methods courses.
4. Align efforts with research-based standards, frameworks and credentials recognized across the field.
Elon’s teacher education programs joined programs from 71 other institutions around the country that have embraced these principles, and the university was one of 20 participating institutions at a related December Innovators’ Summit in Washington, D.C., jointly hosted by the the USDOE and the White House. Jeffrey Carpenter, associate professor of education and director of the Elon Teaching Fellows Program, was an invited speaker at the event. He addressed the first of the four principles, by talking about the active use of social media in teacher education. Carpenter focused specifically on the use of Twitter in Elon’s teacher education programs.