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OFF the WIRE CVC Center Announces Award For Instructional Web Site The CVC Professional Develeopment Center is pleased to announce that the California Virtual Campus (CVC) will award a $2,500 prize recognizing an exceptional instructional Web site at a California community college. The CVC Teaching Web site Award is sponsored by Pearson Education, whose publishing imprints include Addison Wesley Longman, Allyn & Bacon and Prentice Hall. The award will be presented at the CVC Online Learning & Higher Education Conference at the Resort at Squaw Creek near Lake Tahoe, October 22-24, 2000. In order to qualify for the award, a site must have been used for teaching an online course during some term in the calendar year 2000. Nominated Web sites will be judged on educational content, site design, use of multimedia, interactivity and community, and accessibility. College presidents, chief instructional officers, and distance education coordinators have been invited to make nominations, which are due by Friday, September 8, 2000. For more detailed information, please visit the CVC Professional Development Web site at http://pdc.cvc.edu Group Releases Standards for Preparing Teachers to Use Technology in the Classroom The International Society for Technology in Education, as part of a federally supported effort, released national standards and recommendations this week for colleges to use in preparing teachers to use technology effectively in their instruction. The nonprofit group, based in Eugene, Oregon, last fall received a three-year, $2.2-million grant from the U.S. Department of Education to develop the standards. The grant came after federal and private studies had found that most teacher-training programs failed to show their students how to incorporate technology into their teaching. The new standards (http://cnets.iste.org/teachstand.html) describe what beginning teachers should know and be able to do with technology. Those skills include using technology in developing curricula, assessing students, and increasing professional knowledge. The group created performance profiles that show how colleges can pace a prospective teacher's development of skills in using technology through the different stages of teacher preparation. Colleges also must provide adequate conditions and resources in order for students in teacher-preparation programs to meet the standards, the group said. "We emphasized the shared responsibility of colleges of arts and science, teacher-education programs, and K-12 schools in preparing our standards," said Lajeane G. Thomas, an education professor at Louisiana Tech University and the director of the National Educational Technology Standards Project. "Each has an important role in making sure our teachers are prepared to use technology." The standards were developed during the past year by groups that included college faculty members, schoolteachers, district and state officials, and high-tech company representatives. The project's coordinators also sought advice from curricular groups such as the National Science Teachers Association. Arthur E. Wise, president of the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, said that the project influenced his group's inclusion of technology in its new requirements for accreditation. Those requirements, approved by the council's board last month, will apply to all teacher-training programs seeking initial or renewed accreditation beginning in the fall of 2001. A print version of the technology group's recommendations includes examples of how teacher-preparation programs can incorporate its benchmarks into their curricula. Copies of the printed report have been mailed this week to all teacher-training programs at colleges across the nation, Ms. Thomas said. Additional copies may be obtained by calling the society at 800-336-5191. Copyright 2000, The Chronicle of Higher Education. |
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