While primarily designed for K-12 teachers, the National Education Technology Standards (NETS) developed by the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), is also a good starting point for college instructor technology proficiency.
Since 2000, ISTE has been providing the teachers with the listing of baseline technology skills every educator should have. NETS has also provided a widely accepted standard for what students should know about technology.
The concept is simple, if we have accepted a standard of student proficiency; we also need standards for those whom the students depend to teach them. We can take this a step further and see the importance of college instructors modeling the behaviors since the teachers have to be able get this knowledge somewhere.
Let me know what you think,
Mike
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Lists of required technology skills for teachers are a great idea. But, how is the training delivered? There are workshops out there. Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne is even offering a summer workshop for teachers and it does include technology skills for the classroom.
ReplyDelete(http://www.ipfw.edu/dcs/workshops/TeacherWork_Summer09_Web.pdf)
However, as J. Duffield of LeHigh University Integrated Professional Developement school notes:
"The problem with these workshops is that the teacher leaves the workshop excited and determined to try out the new information, but is quickly distracted by the normal set of emergencies and day-to-day tasks that make up a school day. If the teacher isn’t quite ready to use the new strategy when the workshop is scheduled, by the time s/he is ready, the information is no longer fresh in his/her mind. If the new strategies are tried, they rarely work as well as the teacher would like, particularly the first time. By then, there is seldom anyone available to discuss what went wrong and provide follow up support (http://www.lehigh.edu/education/ipds/technology.html)."
Duffield's research involved placing the training in the schools based on needs of the individual classroom teachers. This makes sense to me. Tailor the skills to the needs (http://www.lehigh.edu/education/ipds/assets/ppt/aera_2008_vegas.pdf).
The listing of teacher's skills from ISTE is rather general; do you know if the NETS publication is more specific in what they really want. Perhaps a list much like the one from Laura Turner, which I found most interesting.
ReplyDeleteHere is a website from the state of Texas; they seem to be actually enforcing the ISTE standards
http://www.texasttcc.net/
I prefer this list to the IC3 in your last article because it's more general. While I understand it's harder to measure, holding teaching responsible for knowing specific technologies in an environment where technologies are evolving so rapidly is just as difficult to enforce.
ReplyDeleteNancy and Josh,
ReplyDeleteThe NETS offers a publication which goes into great detail, but I was unable to find a free copy to link to.
Suzon,
ReplyDeleteYes training is a whole other issue. I was just kind of looking for a starting point. Do you think we should start from a list of some sort?
You are correct. It would be good to know whether you could deliver training for the items you intend to put on the list before you do it.
ReplyDelete