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Brave new Internet world
SED trains faculty in high-tech teaching methods with federal grant

By David J. Craig

Next to a front-row seat at London's Globe Theatre, the best place to experience Shakespeare soon could be in a high school classroom. New education software allows students to quickly access definitions of difficult words or concepts while they read text on a computer, to watch streamed video of important dramatic performances, and to simultaneously view different versions of works of literature for comparison.

David Steiner (left), an SED associate professor of curriculum and teaching, and David Whittier, an assistant professor of curriculum and teaching and director of SED's Instructional Materials Center, are overseeing a new training program that encourages SED faculty to learn to use the latest high-tech educational tools. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky

The School of Education is training faculty to use such high-tech instruments and to teach their students how best to integrate them in K-12 curricula with a $1.1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education. The three-year Preparing Tomorrow's Teachers to Use Technology (PT3) grant is accompanied by $1.2 million in matching in-kind services from corporate partners such as WGBH and Apple Computer, and from three local school districts. SED is holding bimonthly technology training sessions, which began September 19, led by staff from SED, the College of Communication, and the corporate partners. In addition, SED graduate students who specialize in educational technology will offer one-on-one tutorials.

"Our students at SED are facing a physical environment in the classroom that is changing extremely rapidly," says David Steiner, an SED associate professor of curriculum and teaching and of administration, training, and policy studies, who is directing the grant. "Within five years, we estimate that most of the districts where our students teach will be fully integrated with the Internet and have computers in almost every classroom. Teachers will be facing a myriad of new products, and it is imperative that we help our faculty use technology intelligently.

"Today, a class studying King Lear can watch a video made by their teacher of their own performance, and read critical essays right on their computer screen," he continues. "I believe such tools, if used carefully by a teacher, allow new forms of rigorous learning, without sacrificing any academic content."

SED faculty are being trained at SED's computer labs and at COM's extensive technology facilities, which include computer, video, and digitizing equipment similar to hardware found increasingly in elementary and high school classrooms. The training sessions are led by David Whittier, an assistant professor of curriculum and teaching at SED and director of the school's Instructional Materials Center, and James Lengel, a COM assistant professor of advertising and public relations. Whittier, who also is coordinator of the SED graduate program in educational media and technology, is co-principal investigator of the PT3 grant. WGBH is providing BU access to its video archive of educational programs for use in developing innovative multimedia teaching tools, which will be used in the training. Apple Computer and several other local corporations are providing access to their facilities.

The faculty will be trained in a variety of skills, such as how to download educational materials from the Web, how to fold such materials into curriculum designs, and how to integrate their own audio and video resources into a Web-based curriculum. The faculty eventually will receive training in technology applications specific to their own academic specialties, which they will introduce in their regular course work and pass on to their students. As part of the grant, three Massachusetts school districts -- Newton, Chelsea, and Concord -- will host SED student teachers who want to use technology in the classroom. These districts also will send technology specialists from their schools to help train SED faculty.

Whittier, who is overseeing the graduate students who have been selected to tutor faculty as part of the grant, says that a strength of the PT3 program is that SED faculty, and eventually students, will be encouraged to design their own technology-based lessons.

"There are a lot of educational computer programs out there that do a good job of presenting information, but research has shown that most of them don't work in the classroom because they're too general and are based on a teacher-in-a-box idea," he says. "No good teacher can be replaced by a computer because teaching involves interactions between a teacher and students and between students and other students.

"My orientation is to help teachers design their own software and other technology-based materials so that they fit their own style and the content they're teaching," Whittier continues. "The materials also have to be flexible and able to be adapted to the particular students a teacher has."

According to Steiner, the introduction of technology at SED will not distract faculty from emphasizing "high standards of academic content" in the curricula their students design.

"Like so many powerful tools, technology can be used for evil or for good, and I'm dedicated to ensuring that we don't treat technology as an add-on or a Band-Aid that you put on education," he says. "What we hope to see is the faculty, at their own pace, weave technology into their curriculum intelligently and appropriately."

Eventually, Steiner says, SED will catalog the innovative teaching methods being used by its students in their teaching practicums to create "an online, high academic quality" high school curriculum.

28 September 2001
Boston University
Office of University Relations