Pre-service teachers

Each individual content-area course has a separate syllabus that highlights the specific technologies and pedagogy that are relevant to the content area. The technology was selected after numerous meetings between methods and technology course instructors. After identifying the most appropriate technology, the methods and technology course instructors co-develop their syllabi with projects that span the two courses. Therefore, students learn about a specific technology on the technology course and they integrate it into their practice teaching experiences within their methods course. In a research collaboration with a methods area faculty member, the technology course instructor found that although pre-service teachers may know how to operate the technology, they do not know how to integrate it effectively within their daily lesson plans, mainly citing that they were not able to envision the type of projects their students could develop. These findings influenced the technology course instructor to develop exemplary models of technology projects and pedagogy for each of the technology course sections (i.e., content areas). For example, an Inspiration TM project was modeled that illustrated how students could construct an understanding of clouds using concept mapping within a science cohort. This project was supplemented by the instructor modeling effective teaching practices using concept mapping in the science classroom. The goal was to move the pre-service teachers from focusing not only on the development of a final technology project on the course, but by encouraging them to think about successful integration in their future classrooms. These examples were placed online so the pre-service teachers had access to them at all times in the development of their own projects for the technology course.