Home PublicationsJRTEPast IssuesVolume 28 Number 5

Edited by Diane McGrath

Volume 28 Number 5 Summer 1996

Teaching Teleapprenticeships: An Innovative Model for Technology Integration in Teacher Education

Abstract

Teachers need to be trained to skillfully integrate technology into their instruction. Teaching Teleapprenticeships (TTa), an innovative program at the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is in its fourth year of integrating technology into the preservice experience of undergraduate education majors. One group targeted by the TTa researchers has been the Year-Long Project (YLP), which involves elementary education majors. Data were collected on the impact of this program on the YLP through surveys, interviews, video, digital images, and a number of nontraditional measures. Results show that technology has become more than an add-on and more than just part of the curriculum they are studying; it is now an integral part of the students' personal as well as professional lives.

Teaching Teleapprenticeships: An Innovative Model for Technology Integration in Teacher Education

In the process of equipping new students to learn with technology, a valuable - perhaps the most valuable - part of the education equation has been virtually overlooked: the teachers.... Despite over a decade of investment in educational hardware and software, relatively few of the nation's 2.8 million teachers use technology in their teaching (foreword-iii).

Today, although many would agree that effective technology use is a critical component in the training of new teachers, it is not central to the teacher preparation experience in many teacher preparation institutions nationwide. "Most new teachers graduate from teacher preparation institutions with limited knowledge of the ways technology can be used in their professional practice" (OTA, 1995, p. 165). A powerful impetus can be progressively built up in the nation's schools if new teachers entering the workforce are trained to skillfully integrate technology into their teaching.

At the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, an innovative model integrationing technology into teacher training, Teaching Teleapprenticeships (TTa), has evolved during the past four years. TTa, funded by the National Science Foundation with additional support from Apple Computer and the Microsoft Corporation, has involved College of Education faculty, student teachers, supervisors, research assistants, and undergraduates in a new approach to technology integration. The TTa approach infuses technology throughout the teacher preparation experience and takes advantage of interdisciplinary faculty teaming. This article explores the successes of the TTa model as indicated by a three-year study of the students' experiences in the year-long project (YLP), a program designed to facilitate the transition from student to elementary education teacher. For these students, technology has become more than an add-on, more than just part of the curriculum they are studying. It has become an integral part of their personal and their professional lives as beginning teachers.

Teaching Teleapprenticeships

PowerBooks equipped with 14.4Kbps internal modems, communications software including Eudora and Netscape, and Microsoft Works have been loaned to groups of student teachers, faculty, and university supervisors as a means to communicate and exchange teaching ideas and projects as part of the TTa research. The project staff, including faculty from several departments in the College of Education and a number of research assistants, have worked cooperatively with college preservice faculty to integrate technology through a number of the preservice courses. A number of sections of the undergraduate classes have been involved in TTa, including the Introduction to Biology class (Levin, Levin & Boehmer, 1994), the YLP for elementary education students, math methods, science methods, English methods, and others. Rather than teach education majors one specific undergraduate course in technology, the model has been to infuse technology throughout a number of preservice classes, using technology both as a means of instruction and as a tool for teaching.

Year-Long Project (YLP)

The undergraduate elementary education students participating in the YLP have been involved in the TTa project for the last three years. This year, 49 students in the YLP share 25 PowerBooks in teams of two. The course instructor, a faculty member in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, cooperatively plans the technology strand with the TTa project staff. This team provides instruction on technology, conducts hands-on workshops , documents the class's work with the technology, and staffs an office for full-time technical assistance.

Much of the students' work is assigned and completed electronically. The students and the faculty participate in a number of mail reflector lists on the College of Education's Learning Resource Server (LRS), a server designed to house and support instructional materials (http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/). All of the students are expected to use technology throughout the YLP experience, and they are encouraged to use their PowerBooks in their assigned schools as well.

Technology instruction includes use of e-mail and Eudora, use of the World Wide Web, integration of multimedia into the curriculum, use of such teaching tools as a database and a spreadsheet, use of "wizards" to create presentations and newsletters, use of digitization tools such as scanners and digital cameras, use of presentation hardware such as an LCD panel and presenter box, and creation of personal homepages on the Web (http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/ylp95-96/ or http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/ylp94-95/).

Students are required to develop a mini unit for their classes. They must use Internet resources in creating this unit. The best units from the 1994-1995 YLP class are posted on the Web (http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/YLP94-95/mini-units/), and the class of 1995-96 has been interested in following the number of "hits" the preceding year's class has been getting on the Web. For example, in November, 1995, the miniunits were accessed 1,301 times by people around the world. Seven countries outside of the United States and at least fifteen states within the U.S. were represented. Interestingly, less than 10% of the hits came from the University of Illinois.

Students have been enthusiastic about this new approach to technology. Most are reluctant to part with their PowerBooks when they leave the program. Analysis of e-mail exchanges, access to the LRS, interviews, video, digitized images, biannual survey data, and some additional nontraditional measures have helped TTa researchers document the success of their model by tracking the integration of technology into the professional and private lives of the YLP students.

Indicators of Integration

TTa researchers have been collecting responses to student surveys at the end of each semester. The students have answered questions concerning problems they've had, successes they've experienced, and other concerns as well as the extent to which they have used the Web and e-mail (http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/ylp95-96/). During the fall 1995 semester, 47 of the 49 students in the YLP responded to the survey. Of these 47, 85% indicated they found e-mail was either "helpful" or "very helpful" in the completion of classwork and assignments, and 54% reported finding the Web either "helpful" or "very helpful" in completing coursework.

At the end of the spring semester, May 1995, the 45 members of the YLP program for 1994-95 were surveyed as they were preparing to graduate and look for their first teaching positions. One question asked how many were planning to use technology in their teaching the next year; 85% responded positively. Of all of the uses of technology listed, most indicated that they were likely to use Internet tools. They also said that they hoped to use multimedia applications and tools such as an electronic gradebook and a database to facilitate their teaching.

The TTa researchers use the semester survey data to guide adaptations and variations in the course structure from one year to the next. Based on the 1994-1995 responses, for example, the TTa group preassessed the 1995-1996 YLP students' incoming technology skills and made some attempt at grouping them according to computer skill level. This was done so that students with computer expertise could learn more advanced network applications while novice users were introduced to the Internet at a comfortable pace. In addition, based on student surveys, more hands-on opportunities were incorporated into the course structure. The 1994 surveys queried students about their use of Gopher. By the 1995 surveys, the course had eliminated instruction in Gopher and jumped to questions about student use of the Web.

An interesting indicator of the extent to which technology was assimilated into the thinking of the student teachers was reflected in their sketches of the ideal classroom. Traditionally in the student teaching curriculum, a standard assignment has been for the students in elementary education to draw a floor plan of the ideal classroom. The YLP faculty made this assignment as usual in the fall of 1994, with no mention of technology. Surprisingly, technology appeared to have permeated the consciousness of 37 out of the 45 students. With no prompting, these students included classroom computers in various configurations in their ideal classrooms. The previous year only 4 of the 45 students included one or more computers in their ideal classrooms.

A more powerful measure of the impact of the technology was the evidence that the student teachers used e-mail and their group mail reflector not only to complete coursework, find Internet resources for their mini units, and correspond with their instructors, but also to plan TGIF parties, design a class T-shirt, and put out requests for extra graduation tickets.

An early draft of Standards for English Language Arts published by the National Council of Teachers of English (1994) and the International Reading Association states that

literacy is profoundly social. Literacy develops in response to students' needs to participate in larger and larger language communities, both at home and in the school. From infancy through adulthood, language and literacy are best learned in social relationships with others and through purposeful and challenging engagements in meaningful activity (p.4).

Technological literacy is also a profoundly social experience, observable in group interactions, in forging new connections beyond walls, and in the cooperative learning that comes from sharing resources.

With the demand for PowerBooks outstripping the number of available machines, necessity forced sharing of PowerBooks in several of the larger sections of the courses. Although admittedly inconvenient, it may have had some hidden benefits, resulting from forced sharing and teamwork. A recent report (West, 1995) based on the research done in Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow (ACOT) suggests that less may be more. The study suggests that students working in clusters or small groups with computers may actually benefit from the group work, and that rather than being an isolating experience, computer work is conducive to cooperative, small-group efforts.

Another nontraditional indicator of the level of integration of technology into the social lives of the student teachers came as they planned their end-of-the-year party. The students wrote a skit, accompanied by a giant storybook entitled Adventures in YLP Land, in which various students wrote adventure stories. In one, a character became trapped in an endless listserve, able to escape only when he learned to click his heels three times while chanting "unsubscribe! unsubscribe! unsubscribe!"

A final graphic measure of the students' integration of technology is documented with video from their actual student teaching experiences. Students were not required to take PowerBooks to schools with them, nor was there a technology requirement in 1994 or 1995 for their actual student teaching. Nevertheless, a number of them chose to integrate technology into their lessons. Video footage from some of these classrooms documents their use of the technology in their teaching experience.

The continuous infusion of technology as a strand in the preservice program has already provided some dramatic results. As reported by the OTA (1995),

Telling students what is possible is not enough, they must see technology used by their instructors, observe the use of technological tools in their classrooms, and practice teaching with technology themselves if they are to use these tools effectively in their own teaching" (p. 184).

Lessons Learned

1. Students benefit from sharing and working in small groups or in teams of two as they learn new technologies. A mathematics instructor commented "The 101/219 students merely see the potential and are 'going ape' over the possibilities. It is the best thing we have tried. I see that if they can learn about math and math teaching in a new and different way, they are more apt to teach differently themselves."
   
2. A key element in the success of this effort has been the strong technical support available to the student teachers. A walk-in office, staffed by research assistants all day, has been able to provide immediate help for most technical problems. As a result, we received a very revealing response when we asked the student teachers in the YLP group in December 1995 what their biggest problems using technology were. A majority wrote "none," did not answer, or wrote "n/a." Of the 22 who did indicate problems, purely technical problems were reported by about five students, such as "PowerBook problems," or "battery problems." Many complained of access-related problems such as having to share PowerBooks, not having enough live phone lines the classroom, or not having enough printers. These could be viewed as successes because they indicate a desire on the part of the students to increase their use of the technology. A third group reported problems with instruction-related items, such as wanting more detailed documentation.
   
3. As reported in surveys and interviews, as much hands-on experience as possible with technology, rather than lectures and demonstrations, is critical. Every semester the faculty has seen a need to increase the hands-on opportunities for the students. Even with increased lab time in the fall semester of 1995, the evaluations still had a number of responses to "What suggestions would you make for changes for next year?" These responses included "more lab time," "more access to computer room," "more computers with modem hookups" or "more time hooked up."
   
4. Real classroom teachers who use technology effectively are the best role models as instructional leaders. Whenever possible, it is important to involve them in the technology strand of teacher education, bringing them in to give demonstrations of their own technology uses or involving them through network interactions with undergraduate education students.
   
5. The contextualization of technology is critical. If student teachers use the Web to find resources for units they are creating, to connect with classrooms across the world for classroom curriculum projects, or to learn to create digitized images of themselves and their students for their personal Web pages, the technology becomes a means to an end rather than an end unto itself, and thus, is much more effective.
   

There are approximately 1300 institutions of higher education preparing future teachers in this country. In the 1990-91 school year, nearly 100,000 student teachers graduated with a bachelors degree in teacher education in the United States. In the next decade, the nation's schools will need to hire about 2 million teachers (p. 166).

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge their appreciation for the support from the following:
National Science Foundation
Apple Computer
Microsoft Corporation
Karl Koenke
Michael Waugh
YLP staff and students

References

Levin, J. A., Riel, M., Miyake, N., & Cohen, M. (1987). Education on the electronic frontier: Teleapprentices in globally distributed educational contexts. Educational Psychology, 12, 254-260.

Levin, S., Levin, J., & Boehmer, R. (1994, April). TeachingTeleapprenticeships in a freshman biology course. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New Orleans, LA.

Levin, J., Waugh, M., Brown, D., & Clift, R. (1994). Teaching Teleapprenticeships: A new organizational framework for improving teachereducation using electronic networks.Journal of Machine-Mediated Learning, 4 (2 & 3), 149-161.

National Council of Teachers of English. (1994). Standards for English language Arts. Unpublished draft.

Office of Technology Assessment (1995). Teachers and technology: Making the connection (OTA-EHR-616). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Available online at: http://www.ota.nap.edu/pdf/1995idx.html.

West, P. (1995). With computers, Apple project finds less may be more. Education Week, 11, 6-8.

Contributors

Evangeline Secaras
Evangeline Secaras is a doctoral Candidate at the University of Illinois, College of Education in the Department of Educational Psychology. Her specialization is in the use of multimedia in the K-12 classroom. Her research interests include how the use of multimedia affects the way teachers teach and the way students learn and what impact this would have on visual literacy in the 21st Century. (Address: Office of Teleapprenticeships, 32 Education Building, UIUC, 1310 S. Sixth St., Champaign IL 61820. E-mail: esecaras@uiuc.edu)

James Levin
Dr. James Levin is a professor in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He says of himself, "For many years I have been exploring ways in which technology can be used to improve education. I am especially excited by the ways in which new communication technologies fundamentally change the relationship between education and the rest of society." (Address: Office of Teleapprenticeships, 32 Education Building, UIUC, 1310 S. Sixth St., Champaign IL 61820. E-mail: j-levin@uiuc.edu).

Copyright © 1996, ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education). All rights reserved.