Arizona State University to Win AACTE Award for Infusing Technology in Methods Courses
AACTE’s Committee on Innovation and Technology has selected the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University to receive the 2017 AACTE Best Practice Award for the Innovative Use of Technology. The award will be presented during the Speaker Spotlight Session on Saturday, March 4, at the AACTE Annual Meeting in Tampa, Florida.
About 5 years ago, the college eliminated its stand-alone educational technology course and instead began infusing the tech content into methods courses. Because of the college’s large size, this undertaking required massive support and commitment among dozens of faculty and administrators. Their infusion initiative was based on a vision to prepare students to teach and learn with technology, achieved through four components:
- Long-range planning for program-wide technology integration curriculum
- Course development to integrate teaching with technology
- Professional development for all teacher preparation faculty
- Continual renewal through research and evaluation
Over time, the college’s initiative has surmounted the challenges of large-scale implementation and won over students and faculty alike. Guided by the principles of technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) and focused on developing both candidates’ and their instructors’ technology-integration skills, the initiative reached 75 sections of 18 methods courses last semester, taught by 59 instructors to over 2,000 students.
“It goes without saying that technology is changing rapidly, but so is our thinking about how technology is used in schools with an express purpose of influencing student learning,” said Carole Basile, dean of the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. “Therefore, it has been critical that this work has been sustained as part of the college budget and was not built on gifts and grants. At the heart of this work are dedicated faculty and staff.”
The AACTE award entry was submitted by a team including Teresa S. Foulger, Ray R. Buss, Keith Wetzel, Stacey Pasquel, and LeeAnn Lindsey. The application notes that the college’s initiative aligns with the National Education Technology Plan released by the U.S. Department of Education Office of Educational Technology and has also generated award-winning research (see this 2014 article published in the Journal of Digital Learning in Teacher Education), which informs ongoing improvements in the initiative.
Every year, the AACTE Committee on Innovation and Technology makes this award to celebrate and recognize innovative use and infusion of educational technologies in educator preparation, particularly initiatives that grounded in the TPACK model. The committee praised the broad scope of Arizona State’s efforts, the leadership team, their intentionality about incorporating TPACK holistically, and their focus on not only candidate outcomes but also faculty development. Learn more about the initiative at this website.
AACTE issued a press release today announcing all of its 2017 award winners. For more information on AACTE’s awards program, visit http://aacte.org/professional-development-and-events/awards. Applications for next year’s awards open in June.
Tags: Annual Meeting, content areas, program improvement, technology
