Technology.

It is for many one of the great opportunities in the next century to improve teaching and learning, and in the College of Education the work of creating an environment that fosters innovative uses of technology in the classroom is well underway.

From the Technology Exploration Center to video-based hypermedia learning environments, the college has launched initiatives and fostered projects that seek to integrate technology into the learning and teaching process.

And the key is creativity and innovation.

"Creativity is important because it creates an environment that encourages people to try out new things," says Yong Zhao, assistant professor in the Department of Counseling, Educational Psychology and Special Education, who has spearheaded some of the college’s initiatives. "That environment is here at the college. We have been trying to engineer such an environment for people to try out different ideas."

For Zhao and others in the college, the work is driven by a belief that the technological tools developed at MSU must be practical for the K-12 classroom. The idea is that technology has value for education only when it is used in authentic contexts to realize educational goals.

Another assumption that underlies the work in the college is that as teachers use technology, they essentially reinvent it. Therefore, teachers should be encouraged to be active participants in the integration and reinterpretation of technology in their own teaching.

The technology initiatives are also driven by the belief that the relationship between technology and pedagogy is not unidirectional. New technology serves as a catalyst for changing existing practices, but the technology itself is also refined by existing pedagogy.

The goal of all of the effort is clear: To help teachers, teacher educators, and students realize some of technology’s immense promise for education.

"It’s apparent that technology is an essential part of the future," says Carole Ames, dean of the College of Education. "We as a college have a responsibility not only to prepare preservice teachers to effectively use technology in the classroom, but to create some of those tools that will make teaching with technology more effective and meaningful."

The environment the college has created is based on three elements: human and technical infrastructure, teacher education initiatives, and research and development. All three elements seek to provide a context to innovations, and ground them in the practicality of the classroom. The elements are also interdependent, each building on each other.

In some ways, creating a human infrastructure to support the use of technology in teaching has been the most daunting task.

Traditionally, the focus is on establishing the technical infrastructure--installing computers, printers, creating networks, establishing Internet connections, etc. For Zhao, that is only half of the story.

It is one thing to equip a school with hardware and software, it is another to establish the human infrastructure that allows teachers to use technology effectively and creatively.

"When our teacher educators want to try to use technology, how do you support that?" Zhao asks. "Better machines and fancier applications are one way, if they can solve the problems."

"But we also need people who understand teachers and subject-matter content and who are willing to spend time with the teachers to support their curriculum goals. That’s what we mean by a human infrastructure at the College of Education."

In crafting that infrastructure, the college has broken away from the usual way of doing things. Traditionally, institutions have sought to put in place the human infrastructure by creating something akin to an office of education technology.

If teachers have problems with technology, they can go to that office for help. The problem is that most teachers or professors don’t have the time to seek out the help, and too often the technology experts are not educators or familiar with the unique needs of the classroom, Zhao says.

So the college has created an environment in which technology experts approach faculty and deliver the service to them. Zhao formed a group of graduate students in education, known as Tech Guides, to work with faculty members on integrating technology into their teaching.

It is, Zhao said, an example of a different approach to bridging the world of teaching and technology. Not only are the Tech Guides technologically savvy, they are also knowledgeable about teaching, learning and subject-matter content.

As the college has moved to incorporate technology into its various programs, the teacher education component has been especially important.

Once again, the college has sought to be creative in the way in which it incorporates technology into the teacher education curriculum. Many programs have dealt with state-mandated technology requirements for preservice teachers by simply offering specific courses on technology.

The college has instead sought to make technology an integral part of every teacher education course. By doing so, such things as e-mail, spreadsheet programs, and the World Wide Web, can be learned in the context of teaching and learning as opposed to being taught as a discrete subject.

In addition, a computerized tracking system has been put in place to keep a record of all teacher education students’ interactions with Tech Guides and attendance at technology workshops and other technology events. The new system is able to keep track of the status of each student’s progress toward meeting the technology requirement. If a student is behind schedule, the system is able to e-mail the student reminding him or her about the requirements.

The e-mail message also includes information about workshops, the Tech Guides, or events the student should attend in order to develop the ability required by the technology requirement.

The college has gone even further by ensuring that students have the opportunity to use what they have learned in the context of the classroom. Last year, the college began providing its fifth-year interns with laptop computers (See story on page 8). The computers not only allow students to stay in better communication with field instructors, but encourages them to think more creatively and critically about using technology in the classroom.

"What we’re doing is taking the opportunity to make sure our future teachers and our teacher educators get a chance to use this technology in a real and meaningful way, rather than to go sit in a workshop that teaches you how to use Microsoft Word," Zhao says. "That approach has really not been proven useful."

In committing to research and development, the college has adhered closely to the practicality test. In other words, if an application is impractical or impossible to take into the classroom either because of expense or difficulty of use, then it is essentially useless.

In developing new tools, the college has sought to ground them in the world of everyday classroom work.

Zhao says places like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are good at developing products. However, the technological tools are created without teachers in mind and thus sometimes fail to gain wide usage because they are so hard to learn or too expensive.

In the college, the goal is not to turn teachers into computer scientists, but to develop tools that can help them teach and students learn and also allow the teachers to be creative in their use of computer-supported learning materials.

"We must develop teacher-friendly tools that not only support existing practice but also pushes teachers forward to explore new possibilities for those applications," Zhao says.

One example of the kinds of things the college has undertaken is Tele-Web (see story opposite), a project that has developed software to help special education students learn how to read and write.

Research is equally as important as development. Faculty and graduate students in the college have been especially interested in how teachers use technology. Zhao has encouraged his graduate students to take on research projects that seek to understand the process by which teachers adopt new technology and expand its use, and how adopting technology changes their practices.

It is for Zhao, the fourth dimension of teacher knowledge, and one of the least explored. The first three are general knowledge, pedagogical knowledge and content knowledge. The fourth area, he says, is technological knowledge.

"What we have here in the college are new tools, tools that we make," he says. "But those tools are made with the context of the classroom in mind. At the same time, we want our graduate students to be actively engaged in that understanding through their own research."

In the end, Zhao says technology is not unlike a child’s building block. It has a definite shape and form, but it can be used to build on and create different things. But Zhao is quick to point out that technology is not a piece of clay that can be molded into any shape.

The college’s goal is to enable future teachers to use those tools effectively and creatively in their teaching, and to create those tools as flexible as possible to allow teachers to expand the range of possibilities for their use.