PREPARING PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS TO USE TECHNOLOGY TO EFFECTIVELY TEACH EARTH SCIENCE: A PROGRAM PERSPECTIVE

Prior to implementing appropriate technology to engage students in geoscience concepts, teachers need opportunities to develop comfort with these tools and practice using them in scaffolded environments with increasing complexity. Teachers’ technological knowledge, and how it interplays with both their pedagogical and content knowledge, can limit their ability to design and facilitate engaging experiences with technology. While teacher preparation programs have recognized the importance of developing this complex situated knowledge, they have often struggled with the selection and practical utilization of educational technologies. In this presentation, we share how one urban residency-based teacher preparation program with a focus on geoscience selected its range of specific educational technologies and how technology support is provided across the program.

We provide an overview of the technologies utilized in our teacher preparation program, including the learning management system, a lending library of various educational technologies, and a platform for the sharing and annotation of classroom video. We review the means for assessing the needs of residency schools as well as the broad strategies, specific tactics, and assessments for optimizing the purposeful use of these technologies in order to support the educational goals and objectives of the program. We also discuss the means for supporting both our faculty and our students in the use of these technologies. By sharing these strategies and tactics we hope to provide other teacher preparation programs with ideas and inspiration on how they can prepare their preservice teachers to use technology to support student engagement by infusing these technologies across their program.