Bringing Teacher Education Reform to Digital Life: Building Contextual, Representational, and Environmental Infrastructure

In this project, we propose to build on our current PT3 Capacity Grant (1999-2000) and Title II (1999-2004) initiative, to implement an institution-wide performance assessment model for teacher education that fully integrates International Society of Technology in Education (ISTE) and National Educational Technology Standards (NETS) in all areas of the teacher education program. This University-wide endeavor will utilize our Professional Development Schools (PDS) Network to build a reciprocal relationship between pre-service and in-service teachers as they integrate technology into their present and future practice.

The principle goal of this PT3 Implementation Project is to build infrastructure along three dimensions - contextual, representational, and environmental - that will facilitate the implementation of the teacher education reform goals initiated by our Title II grant. There will be three areas of focus: (a) implementing new contexts for technology integration by extending reciprocal apprenticeships within our PDS Network to support the production and distribution of teaching cases and curriculum units; (b) developing large-scale, Web-enabled, relational databases that will facilitate and represent competency profiling, performance assessment, and digital portfolios; and (c) developing new teaching environments that will sustain and promote the long-term use of technology in the teacher education program. This project will continue the video case initiative from our PT3 Capacity Grant as a vehicle for building a teacher education knowledge base. We will scale up our video case environment to be integral with a Web-based learning interchange that archives teaching units created by and for pre- and in-service teachers.