Photo Caption: The Tech Guides team: (from left to right) Meg Ropp, Yong Zhao, Bob Benham, Sheri Rop, Wes Rich, Val Worthington, Andy Topper, Keijun Hou, Larry Douglas, and Jing Schen.

They are known as Tech Guides, and in the College of Education they are playing a key role in helping faculty integrate technology into their teaching and ensuring that teacher education students meet the state-mandated technology proficiency requirement.

Initiated in the fall of 1997, the innovative effort involves nine doctoral students in the college who have been actively reaching out to teacher education faculty, as well as students.

Their focus is to make technology as available as possible in order to encourage faculty to use it. However, they are not waiting to be asked for help, instead they are calling on faculty and instructors and offering ideas as to how they might use technology in their teaching.

The idea is that by having faculty use technology in their own teaching students begin to see how technology can be used in the classroom. It becomes more than simply an add-on to the teaching process.

"We are pushing a collaborative model," said Andy Topper, a doctoral student in educational psychology and a Tech Guide. "We work with instructors to solve problems by helping them see how technology might solve their problems. I think of it more of a consulting relationship, or an advisory relationship.

"That is why the term guide was really important. We’re helping guide teachers toward a new way of teaching with technology. But we’re not doing it for them. We’re not telling them. They are deciding what they want and we’re advising and guiding and supporting their goals."

A second important component of the work of Tech Guides is to make sure that every teacher education student is proficient in the use of technology. The state mandates that prospective teachers must demonstrate technology competencies. The college has thus required that teacher education students demonstrate five competencies: use of e-mail, word processing software, spreadsheets, the Internet, and subject-matter software.

In order to insure that all students are proficient in the use of the technology tools, the Tech Guides hold workshops that are open to any student or faculty member. The workshops provide students the opportunity to become proficient in the use of technology and to meet the requirements.

Rodney Williams, who is a doctoral student in the Department of Teacher Education, said that the workshops aren’t the focus of their work. In fact, the number of weekly workshops has decreased from about five to only three.

However, Williams said the workshops are in place to make sure every student has had proper training and has completed the state mandate.

In addition to the workshops, the Tech Guides have in place a database that keeps track of students’ progress toward meeting the requirements, and are capable of flagging those who are behind in completing the work.

For Topper, however, the key is the integration. Eventually, he hopes the workshops won’t be needed because technology requirements are provided for in all of the students’ courses.

"I think our program is innovative in a lot of ways," Topper said. "When we looked around at what everybody else was doing, we saw a lot of the same stuff we had done in the past. We said to ourselves, ‘We’re going to learn something from our experiences, we’re going to look at them critically, and we’re going to find a more effective way to do it.’ And we’re also going to draw on our own understandings of the way teachers and adult learns and that’s going to inform our decisions about what to do."

"In the long term, we think that if the goal is to infuse technology into the teacher education program, this way of working almost one-on-one as guides or advisors with these instructors and faculty members is the more effective way to insure infusion of technology."

Within the past few years, the college has also moved to provide for those who demonstrate advanced technological skills. There is now an Educational Technology Program. Completion of the work leads to receipt of a certificate from the college indicating their knowledge about and experience with many of the applications of technology in education.

In previous years, the college has had Tech Mentors and even Tech Coaches. However, those efforts relied on workshops and training sessions, which Topper said led students and instructors to view technology as an add-on.

What the nine Tech Guides hope to achieve is that technology will come to be viewed by instructors and teacher education students as integral to their work as textbooks.