National Study to Examine Best Ways to Prepare Teachers to Use Technology
The Center for Evaluation and Education Policy in the Indiana University School of Education will partner with a Washington, D.C.-area company for a project examining how current and emerging technologies are being used in classrooms and how to prepare new teachers to best use these tools.The "Leveraging Education Technology to Keep America Competitive" study has just begun with a $3.1 million contract through the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Educational Technology.
"To our knowledge the federal government and the U.S. Department of Education have never really funded a comprehensive study of how cutting-edge technologies are being used in pre-service education," said Jonathan Plucker, director of the Center for Evaluation and Education Policy (CEEP) in the IU School of Education, and deputy project manager of the study.
Plucker said technological advances have made this a vastly different society. "But a common criticism is that that's not really changing the way that we teach," he said. "It's not changing the way we deliver education. It's not changing the way that students learn. This study gives us the resources to go out and do a very comprehensive and careful study to figure out if those things are happening."
Over a technical plan that breaks down into seven "task" areas, the project will produce an overall assessment of technology use in the classroom by April 2009. While that final work will help direct federal policy towards technology in education, a series of white papers issued throughout the length of the project will give immediate insight into the issues the work is tackling.
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