Technology for Teacher Preparation

TEACHER PERFORMANCE EXPECTATIONS (TPE) AND TECHNOLOGY

VIDEO CASE STUDIES

SB2042 TECH TOPICS

RESEARCH AND INFORMATION LITERACY

COMPUTER ETHICS

TECHNOLOGY AND LEARNING

TEACHER PRODUCTIVITY

COMPUTER BASICS

ELECTRONIC PORTFOLIOS

DISCUSSION TOPICS

WEB READER

POWERPOINT PRESENTATION

WEB VERSION

MAE IN TECH

CHAPMAN UNIVERSITY

Website Designed for Students and Teachers of Chapman University College 

Carla Piper, Ed. D.

piper@chapman.edu 

Preparing teachers for the 21st Century has been a concern for both political and educational leaders in this country during the last two decades. In the fifth State of the Union address on February 4, 1997, President Clinton challenged America to make teaching a national priority. In response to the president's address, the U.S. Department of Education developed priorities that focus on strategies to improve education. These strategies called for a talented, dedicated, and well-prepared teacher in every classroom, clear state standards of achievement and accountability for all children, technological literacy for every young person entering the workforce in the 21st Century, and a safe, disciplined school environment (U.S. Department of Education, 1997).

Public education reform was triggered a decade earlier by a report, A Nation at Risk, which claimed that U.S. students generally achieved at lower skill levels than those of other industrialized nations (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983). The Goals 2000: Educate America Act enacted by Congress in 1994, provided the framework for education reform for the 21st Century. This legislation called for the establishment of high-quality, internationally competitive content and performance standards for all students, promoted the use of technology to enable all students to achieve national goals, and emphasized the need for teacher education and professional development. Teachers were to be given the opportunity to acquire the knowledge and skills needed to instruct and prepare students for the next century. They were to have access to programs to improve professional skills and encouraged "to use emerging new methods, forms of assessment, and technologies" (The National Education Goals Panel, 1998, Goal 4, p. 1).

Three themes of significance for this study converged in recent education reform documents concerning the preparation of teachers for the 21st Century: teacher accountability to professional content and certification standards, performance-based authentic assessment for both teachers and students, and the need for educators to have technological expertise. The U.S. Department of Education's New Teacher's Guide stated: "The highest academic standards, the best facilities, the strongest accountability measures, and the latest technology will do little good if we do not have a teaching force of the highest quality" (1997, September, p. 1). Providing well-prepared, technological literate teachers who meet high professional standards has presented a challenge to pre-service teacher training institutions.

The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) issued a report called "Technology and the New Professional Teacher: Preparing for the 21st Century Classroom" in 1997. The NCATE Task Force on Technology and Teacher Education recommended that NCATE stimulate more effective uses of technology in teacher education programs. In order to prepare students to teach in tomorrow's classrooms, "they must experiment with effective applications of computer technology for teaching and learning in their own campus practice" (NCATE, 1997). The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) presented guidelines for accreditation to NCATE for the use of technology in teaching and learning in schools of education (1995).

NCATE has challenged higher education to incorporate technology across the entire teacher education program, not just as a "computer literacy" class added to the existing curriculum (1997, p.7). A study done by the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) entitled "Teachers and Technology: Making the Connection," stated that far too many colleges of education are teaching about technology as a separate subject, rather than teaching with technology across the curriculum (OTA, 1995). A 1996 study of 56 colleges of education sponsored by the Northwest Technology Consortium (NETC), resulted in two recommendations: technology needs to be a pervasive part of how faculty teach; and preparation of pre-service teachers to use and integrate technology in their future classrooms needs to be emphasized (Queitzsch, 1997).

The NCATE task force stated that "today's teacher candidates will teach tomorrow as they are taught today" (p.4). This report emphasized that teacher education has the responsibility to prepare students for teaching in the 21st Century, even though that future is impossible to predict with the rapid developments in technology. The task force stated that teacher education is in a time of transition, calling for experimentation and a new attitude that is "fearless in the use of technology" (p.6). NCATE recommended that teacher education programs provide early experiences for their students and that technology be integrated into other education reform efforts (p. 8). This study focused on the use of technology as a tool for performance assessment of teacher candidates as evidence of achieving certification standards.

Carla Piper, Ed. D.