Old Tools, New Tools: Redesigning a Teacher Education Instructional Technology Course

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1 Old Tools, New Tools: Redesigning a Teacher Education Instructional Technology Course Anne Sauder Wall College of Education Austin Peay State University United States walla@apsu.edu Abstract: Instructional technology is an integral component of teacher education programs in the United States. Many programs depend upon a required course to ensure that their pre-service teachers meet the program s instructional technology standards and are prepared to effectively use technology in their future classrooms. This case study reflects decisions made during a complete redesign of a teacher education instructional technology course, moving from assignments heavily dependent on proprietary software to assignments that primarily use free online applications while still meeting the same standards. Introduction Teacher education programs play a vital role in preparing future educators to implement technology in the classroom by infusing technology into instructional activities and modeling effective technology integration into courses, (Oliver, Osa, & Walker, 2012). Although some programs are designed with the goal of integrating technology throughout all teacher education courses, a required (and usually stand-alone) instructional technology course is an integral element of teacher education programs across the United States (Betrus, 2012). While all courses required in teacher education programs need frequent updates in course material to stay in sync with current educational trends and research, the content and learning activities in an educational technology course must be updated every semester to keep pace with the dramatic changes in the technology available to teachers and students in today s classrooms. Occasionally, however, a more comprehensive overhaul is necessary to ensure that the course covers the relevant and current technology available to educators today. Central to the teacher education program at a mid-sized southeastern university are seven professional education standards, one of which addresses the technology use of pre-service teachers. This standard requires teacher candidates to promote the equitable, ethical, and legal use of technology resources and to use technology to facilitate developmentally appropriate student learning as well as to enhance their professional growth and productivity. The general objective of this technology standard is further divided into nine sub-standards. This paper will focus on each of the nine sub-standards, the previous methods used for teaching them, and a description of how the redesigned course will addresses these sub-standards. The paper will detail the process and rationale for redeveloping a teacher education instructional technology course from one in which course assignments are highly dependent on office suite applications to one in which the students use a variety of free online websites and tools that emphasize student inquiry and collaborative learning. At the same time, the paper will show how this course redesign will integrate the content of the course into the structure of the course. Background Over a decade ago, Betrus and Molenda (2002) contacted deans of Schools of Education across the United States and asked them to complete a survey about their pre-service instructional technology courses. The results of this survey indicated the courses mostly focused on instruction in productivity tools such as word processing, spreadsheet, database, and presentation software. Although the 2002 study indicated the Internet/World Wide Web was a popular topic, at this early stage the Internet was mostly viewed as a means for obtaining static instructional materials. In a similar study conducted ten years later, Betrus (2012) found that nearly 50% of topics reported as currently taught did not even appear on the questionnaire in the previous study. For this reason, it is not surprising

2 that many of the tools now used in instructional technology courses (e.g. wikis, Twitter, blogs, podcasts, and social networking tools) are Web 2.0 tools that did not or barely existed a decade ago. Not only are instructional technology tools changing and improving, but the way K-12 students learn is changing with them. The complete integration of technology into students modern lives has resulted in a different type of student, one who thinks, learns, and experiences the world differently than ever before. Students of all ages are surrounded by technology every day, and interacting with friends and family using online tools and applications is more seamless than ever. Integrating that same level of technology use in their learning environment is a natural expectation, but is not always the case. Teachers are often unprepared to effectively integrate technology resources in the curriculum due to lack of adequate preparation in their teacher education programs (Hicks, 2011). Therefore, teacher education programs face the challenge of staying abreast of the latest educational technology resources and creating learning experiences that will equip future teachers with the tools necessary for successful technology integration in their classrooms. Course Structure For the past several years, the instructional technology course at Austin Peay State University has been designed so that the student learning activities meet the nine technology standards by integrating them into a class project created using LiveText software. The APSU College of Education requires a LiveText account for all its students and integrates the software in a variety of ways throughout their programs. For this reason, using a LiveText template to create the instructional technology project was logical. However, a significant downside to using the LiveText template is that, due to its expense, there is little likelihood that future teachers will have access to this software in their classrooms. The question then is what tools are available to create a dynamic, online learning structure for the instructional technology class project that future K-12 teachers can then use effectively when they have their own classrooms. One prime candidate is Edmodo, a social learning platform for teachers, students, and parents that is commonly thought of as Facebook for schools. Unlike LiveText, Edmodo is not just a tool pre-service teachers use for their university courses but is also a powerful class organizational system they can easily integrate into their own classrooms. In addition to completing assignments in Edmodo, students can chat, share resources, and create their own personal learning network. Another advantage of using Edmodo for their instructional technology course is that the pre-service teachers will experience the tool from a student s perspective, giving them the opportunity to interact with the program as their future students might do before they create their own Edmodo courses as K-12 teachers. The second tool used to define the new course structure is Class Dojo. This web based classroom management system has a simple premise: each student is represented in Class Dojo with an avatar (students pictures may be substituted for the avatars) that is projected in the classroom. The teacher creates lists of desirable and undesirable behaviors for the class and updates student behavior by adding or removing points. While this may sound elementary for high school or college students, there are certainly desirable and undesirable behaviors exhibited by students at any grade level. For example, behaviors like arriving late or missing class are somewhat common among college students and can be easily tracked using Class Dojo. And, as observed about Edmodo, by integrating Class Dojo into this instructional technology course, teacher education students will have the opportunity to use the tool as a student prior to implementing it as a teacher. Both Edmodo and Class Dojo have apps designed for iphone and ipad, as well as other tablets and mobile devices, making classroom organization and management possible from any location. The three other tools that will be integral components of the course structure may already be familiar to many teacher education students, but the course will begin with ensuring everyone has an account for each tool and knows the fundamentals of use. First, Google Drive will be used throughout the course in lieu of Microsoft Office for any word processing, spreadsheet, drawing, and presentation needs. Second, at the beginning of the course students will create a blog using the Google Blogger tool, which they will use to make weekly posts to reflect on each of the sub-standards and the corresponding assigned activities as well as their insights and discoveries in instructional technology. Third, students will create an account in Dropbox, an online storage and collaboration tool, which they will use to store any resources or assignments not already saved to the Google Drive. By using these tools as the backbone for the class structure, all course resources will be conveniently accessible to students via the Internet, regardless of operating system, browser preference, or device.

3 The Technology Standards The nine technology sub-standards discussed below were adopted by the local College of Education to provide the framework for the Instructional Technology course. The teacher education students will choose a subject area and grade level they would most like to teach in the future, and from that they will select a Common Core standard on which they will focus their projects. Each of the sub-standards will be met by the completion of one or more learning activities submitted through an online repository. Whereas in previous versions of the course the assignments for the technology standards were posted to LiveText, in the new course model each of the assignments will be created in Edmodo and the students will submit their work there. Sub-standard 1. Candidates integrate instructional technology to facilitate learning in their classrooms, to supplement instructional strategies, to design instructional materials, and to enhance hands-on experiences and problem solving. Previous assignments to meet this standard included drawing an ideal classroom using the drawing tools in Microsoft Word, creating an interactive PowerPoint presentation, and designing a WebQuest through Questgarden. The first two assignments require costly proprietary software that may or may not be available to teachers as they begin their careers, and the third has a charge after the initial 30-day trial. In the new course model, students will create their ideal classroom but will use instead the Classroom Architect. This tool provides a grid background on which students can add a variety of classroom objects such as desks, computers, projectors, and rugs. They can also use the drawing tools to design their own classroom objects. In addition, instead of simply designing a basic classroom floor plan, the focus of this assignment will shift to emphasize designing a classroom that integrates technology throughout the physical space. Students can save their classroom design as a PDF file and attach it to the assignment in Edmodo. The interactive PowerPoint assignment was a good method for students to create instructional materials, but it, like the classroom drawing assignment, required Microsoft Office. Today, there are a multitude of free resources available to create interactive instructional materials; one of these is Quizlet. Quizlet is a quick and easy tool for creating online flash cards and other study tools. The pre-service teachers will identify the academic vocabulary their future K-12 students must master to address the Common Core standard they selected. Then they will create Quizlet sets based on this vocabulary, which they can make using text, images, data, or a combination. These Quizlet sets can be used to study flashcards as well as to self-quiz by either typing in or speaking the correct answer. Quizlet can then be easily embedded into an Edmodo page when the assignment is submitted. Creating an original WebQuest has been an assignment in the Instructional Technology course for over a decade. WebQuests are inquiry-oriented lessons that focus on solving a real-world problem and are formatted so that most or all of the information that learners work with comes from the Internet. For the past several years, the WebQuest assignment has been completed using Questgarden, a powerful online WebQuest creation tool designed by Dr. Bernie Dodge, the original developer of the WebQuest. Although this is an excellent, well-supported tool, it is only available for free for a 30-day trial, after which there is a small charge to continue using the tool. Although the cost is small, most students let the free subscription lapse, so using this tool suffers from the disadvantage that many students create their WebQuest for the course never to access or use it again. Another tool, Zunal, has recently emerged as a rival to Questgarden. Zunal s main advantage is that their free trial includes creating one free WebQuest for which access does not expire; however, to create more WebQuests, Zunal also charges a small fee. Both Questgarden and Zunal are easy to use and produce attractive, professional-looking WebQuests that enable pre-service teachers to create original, online instructional materials that incorporate problem-solving and higher order thinking. Sub-standard 2. Teacher candidates select and use grade-level and content-specific technology resources, including assistive technology, to increase student participation in the total curriculum. In past versions of this course, students were assigned two learning activities to meet this standard. The first, an assistive technology assignment, required students to choose a disability they might encounter with a student in their future classroom and use an online catalogue to identify a piece of assistive technology that might help that student more actively engage with the curriculum. Although this assignment effectively introduced the concept of assistive technology to the pre-service teachers, they were only focused on identifying a technology aid

4 for a single disability rather than building a toolbox of resources for any of the variety of disabilities they might encounter in their future classrooms. The second assignment for this standard involved exploring Google Earth and searching for a Google Earth lesson that could be used, or modified to use, to teach the selected Common Core standard. While Google Earth is a powerful educational tool and certainly one future teachers should explore, Google Earth lessons are more relevant to certain grade levels and subject areas than others. Literally hundreds of thousands of educational resources are returned by a simple Google search using terms from Common Core Standards; the challenge is in knowing how to organize these resources and then find them again when they are needed. In an effort to improve the overall assignment while also providing teacher education students with a wide variety of resources to engage their future students in the curriculum, the tool Livebinders was selected for the new course model. Livebinders uses the simple concept of digital three ring binders to organize teaching and learning resources. This tool allows teacher education students to collect resources relating to their chosen subject area and grade level as well as assistive technologies that might be used to engage students with disabilities more fully. For this assignment, students will create a free account with Livebinders and set up three blank binders. One binder will be content specific resources, the second grade level specific resources, and the third assistive technology resources. For each of the binders, students will clearly describe the binder s purpose and collect a minimum of ten resources. An added advantage of this tool is the robust search tool within the larger Livebinders community; students can search for resources already posted by other educators and collect them in their own binder if they choose. In addition to the Livebinders assignment, students will use another tool, Powtoon, to create an online tutorial for their future students. Powtoon is a free tool that allows students to quickly create explainer videos, the brief, to the point animated videos or presentations used to describe or explain a topic. Through Powtoon, students will create their own animated tutorial on some concept related to their selected Common Core standard. An additional advantage to Powtoon is that it can be accessed directly through the Edmodo interface. Sub-standard 3. Teacher candidates apply technology to analyze assessment data and to guide classroom decisions regarding student learning. The previous assignment addressing this standard included analyzing benchmark test data from the local school system to identify areas of weakness in need of remediation. After analyzing the data, pre-service teachers selected an online learning activity that could remediate that weakness. While at one time this assignment was a good match for the standard, in the several years since it was first used the standards have changed from state standards to Common Core standards, and many administrators no longer allow their teachers to assess the raw test data. Nevertheless, regardless of their access to standardized test data, in-service teachers will have many opportunities to assess their own students and make instructional decisions based on those assessments. Several new tools build on these assessment opportunities. InfuseLearning is one of several excellent audience response systems available online for educators. InfuseLearning does not require any special hardware or application; it only requires a device with an Internet connection. Students and teachers can participate and interact with their phones, tablets, or computers. Setup is easy, and teachers can easily use the tool for both formative and summative assessments. One interesting feature of InfuseLearning is the drawing tool. Students can draw objects to answer questions, which is particularly useful for any subject in which a text-based or multiple-choice response is not sufficient. Another advantage of InfuseLearning is its usefulness for formative assessment. Although summative quizzes and tests can easily be created in the application, teachers can view student responses immediately to gain information on mastery of the content. This means teachers can quickly know where and for whom re-teaching is necessary. For this course, the assignment will be to create a seven-question assessment in InfuseLearning using each of the question types available. They will then launch the quiz to several classmates who will take the quiz. Based on their classmates responses, the preservice teachers will analyze the results and make instructional decisions based on this analysis. InfuseLearning will also be integrated in the course structure as a tool to assess the pre-service teachers comprehension of the course material. Another tool that will help teachers assess students and make instructional decisions based on those assessments is ScootPad. ScootPad is a personalized, self-paced, online learning platform that continually assesses students as they complete online Common Core standards-based activities and games. It is an excellent tool for providing practice activities targeted at areas in which students need the most help. Student rolls can be imported from Edmodo, and each evening ScootPad s the teacher, reporting information about how many students are

5 scoring above and below proficiency. The reports are quite specific and are helpful to both educators and parents who want to know which skills need the most practice. Because only in-service teachers can create a free account for ScootPad, there will be no assignment connected to the tool, but in their blogs pre-service teachers will reflect on how they could use this tool in their future classrooms. Used together, InfuseLearning and ScootPad are powerful tools for using assessment information to make instructional decisions. Sub-standard 4. Teacher candidates use technology in their own learning process and to change their current educational practice. In the previous version of the instructional technology course, students researched podcasts and identified several that would provide more information about the subject area they planned to teach. Students also created an original podcast using Garageband, a tool specific to Apple computers. While listening to published podcasts is an excellent way to learn, the Internet is overflowing with ideas to improve teaching and learning. An outstanding method for finding the latest educational information on the Internet is the social networking site Twitter. While many students use Twitter as a means for communicating with friends and family, perhaps its greatest strength is its powerful search tool. Even unregistered users can search Twitter using hashtags or regular search terms. Two hashtags that produce excellent results for educators are #edchat and #edtech. While a search for #edchat results in information and resources contributed by leaders in the education world, a search for #edtech returns cutting edge educational technology resources suggested by renowned experts in the field. For the Twitter assignment in the new model of this course, students will find websites or tools relating to their selected Common Core standard and post the resource on Twitter, including both #edtech and a unique hashtag created for our class. Throughout the semester, students will each take a turn sharing their sites in the face-to-face class, and the resources will also be available at anytime by searching for the class s unique hashtag in the virtual Twitter classroom. Another excellent resource for pre-service teachers who are using technology to change their current educational practice is Pinterest. Pinterest is a visual bookmarking site that allows users to create topic-based boards where they pin images and links of interest to them. Many boards are shared publicly, and educators have embraced this tool to pin their best ideas for classroom management, learning activities, and various other topics related to K- 12 education. For the assignment in this course, students will create a Pinterest account (or use an existing one) and create a minimum of four boards with topics related to their selected subject area and grade level. On each board they will pin two original pins, websites, or images they have found on the Internet as well as two repins, useful pins found on other Pinterest boards. Using tools such as Twitter and Pinterest to stay in tune with tools and strategies used by leaders in the field of education will guide pre-service teachers as they make decisions in their own future classrooms. Sub-standard 5. Teacher candidates use technology to gather, sort, and analyze information needed for their own research projects. For this standard, students in previous semesters learned about the university library database, including how to find articles as well as use the online library catalogue and access article databases. Their assignment was to search for and find three scholarly articles concerning their selected subject area or grade level and submit them through LiveText with a short synopsis and APA citation. While this assignment addresses the standard, in the new course model it will be expanded to incorporate an excellent online organizational tool. Evernote enables users to create digital notebooks and to collect any number of files in them, including text-based notes, images, URLs, online articles, and voice recordings. A significant benefit of this tool is that it works with almost every computer, phone, and tablet device available; another advantage to organizing research materials with Evernote is its excellent search function. Users can create notebooks for various topics in their research as well as simply post resources as they are found. Then they can search the notebooks, notes, tags, and even text within images to find the information they have gathered. Finally, students can submit their collection of resources by sharing individual notebooks via RSS to their Edmodo account. Sub-standard 6. Teacher candidates use technology to effectively communicate with students, parents, and colleagues.

6 Students in earlier sections of the Instructional Technology course completed two assignments to fulfill this standard. In the first, they used Microsoft Office applications to create a mail merge document from a student grade book. In the second assignment, they created a basic ten slide instructional PowerPoint presentation. Both of these assignments meet the standard, but both also include proprietary software. In the new model, one option to replicate the mail merge assignment might be in Google Drive with a Google Education account; however, numerous other online tools are available that provide teachers with methods for communicating with students, parents, and colleagues. Two presentation tools stand out, however, in terms of their longevity on the Internet and their cost: Google Presentation and Jing. Google Presentation is a tool available through Google Drive, the suite of tools that has replaced Google Docs. Google s presentation tool, which is streamlined and easy to use, contains most, but not all, of the features available in Microsoft s PowerPoint software. A main advantage of Google Presentation is that it is free and available online through any Web browser and any operating system. Students can begin presentations in class, work on them later in the library, and finish them at home, all by simply logging in to their Google account. This sort of mobility is not possible with PowerPoint unless the proprietary software is installed on each computer. Another advantage of Google Presentation is its collaborative nature. As is the case with all tools in the Google Drive suite, Google Presentation allows users to edit and collaborate in real time. In the new course model, the assignment for pre-service teachers would be similar to previous versions of the course but using Google Presentation rather than PowerPoint. Jing, a free tool from the TechSmith company, can be used to create short, narrated videos comprised of screen captures or onscreen action that can then be uploaded to and shared from the screencast.com website. Jing allows teachers to share images, add notes or highlights, and make video tutorials for students. In the new course model, the Jing assignment will be to create a Jing account, use the application to create a narrated tutorial of a webbased tool useful to their future students, upload it to screencast.com, and share it through Edmodo. Additionally, the course itself will have multiple Jing videos integrated throughout the assignments. Although there are innumerable excellent tools for communication available on the Internet, one of the most established is the web log, or blog. As mentioned previously, students will create a blog for reflection on course assignments, but for Standard 6, the pre-service teachers will also research existing educational blogs and select several that are of particular interest to them. They will share their selected blogs via the class Edmodo site and discuss how they might use ideas from these sources as a means of communicating with their future students, parents, and colleagues. Sub-standard 7. Teacher candidates use tools such as databases and spreadsheets for sorting, compiling, and analyzing data gathered from a variety of sources. Prior to the course redesign, students created a grade book in an Excel spreadsheet and incorporated a variety of formulas, formats, and charts. They then used the data from the spreadsheet to create the mail merge document for that Standard 6 assignment. This activity will be replicated in the new version of the course by creating the grade book in a Google spreadsheet rather than Excel. After completing the grade book activity, students will explore the classroom applications of Google forms. In-service teachers are using Google forms for a variety of purposes; for this assignment, teacher education students will explore two of them. First, they will create a Getting to Know You form to collect student information; they will determine what information they would like to have about their future class, create a form with questions to address that information, and embed it in Edmodo. The teacher education students will spend part of one class period completing each other s forms to provide data for the form creators to sort and analyze in a Google spreadsheet. The third assignment for this standard will be to create a self-grading test using Google Drive tools. Teacher education students will create a ten-question quiz related to their selected Common Core standard in a Google form. This assignment will integrate the Google form quiz results into a Google spreadsheet. Based on this tutorial, students will manipulate the form s resulting spreadsheet to write formulas that will grade the quiz. They will also use the sorting tool in the Google spreadsheet application to sort the resulting data by the different column headings. Students will share the URL of their forms and their Google spreadsheets through the Edmodo site. Tools such as Google forms and spreadsheets demonstrate the ease and effectiveness of current technology in analyzing data from a variety of sources.

7 Sub-standard 8. Teacher candidates effectively use and manage all technology available to them and explore uses of emerging resources. The overall redesigned structure of this course will reflect this standard. However, this is also a good opportunity to introduce pre-service teachers to some other non-specific technology resources. As mobile learning becomes increasingly prevalent in classrooms today, pre-service teachers must be prepared to use whatever devices are available to them. Many school systems are purchasing class sets of ipads, both for their interactive nature and for the wide variety of educational applications available for free or a small fee. In addition to these educational apps, many of the resources mentioned in this paper have apps for mobile devices as well. For this assignment, teacher education students will research and evaluate ipad apps for their appropriateness in the subject area and grade level they have selected. After researching apps from a variety of sources, students will use this App Review Form to evaluate and review three apps they find particularly impressive. The class as a whole will be able to view the results via a link to a Google spreadsheet that will compile the evaluations from the Google form. As the semesters pass and the reviews of ipad apps from pre-service teachers accumulate, the value of the resulting Google spreadsheet database will increase for educators searching for appropriate apps to use in the classroom. Another emerging resource available both online and for mobile devices is Scoop.it. Scoop.it is a tool that enables users to curate information on topics of interest and integrates that information into an online magazine format. This is an excellent tool for collecting emerging resources and organizing them according to topics. Preservice teachers in this course will create a Scoop.it account and select four topics, including appropriate keywords, of interest to them as future educators. Scoop.it interfaces with Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and various other social media outlets to generate online resources matching each topic. As curator, students will then select a minimum of five resources from those suggested or others found on their own to add to their Scoop.it virtual magazines, which will be shared with classmates via the course Edmodo site. While these two assignments do not address the entire depth and breadth of emerging technology resources, they are representative examples of technology available to future teachers. Key skills for making good use of any emerging resources in the classroom are evaluation and organization, both of which are addressed in these assignments. Sub-standard 9. Teacher candidates model the legal and ethical use of technology resources. This final standard is one of primary importance. While assignments for previous standards also touch on this standard, it is imperative that pre-service teachers have a thorough understanding of the ethical use of technology, not only as it pertains to their own use but also in terms of their future students. One of the most comprehensive sites devoted to the topic of the ethical use of technology is Northern Gateway Digital Citizenship Resources. This excellent collection of online resources includes sites dealing with online bullying, copyright issues, understanding digital citizenship, etc., and its interactive interface delivers this information to students of all ages. Using this collection of resources, pre-service teachers in the course will choose one of the tools previously researched in the course, or a tool they discovered through researching emerging technology, to create an interactive ethics learning activity for the grade level and subject area they plan to teach. Each student s learning activity will be shared with their classmates through the course Edmodo site, adding to their resources for teaching about digital citizenship. Conclusion The goal of this course redesign is not only to teach future educators about online tools they can use to enhance teaching and learning in K-12 classrooms, but also to infuse the tools about which they are learning into the actual structure of the instructional technology course. When pre-service teachers experience these tools as students and then employ them as teachers, they can more effectively integrate them into the curriculum. Even after this major overhaul, regular updates will continue to be necessary. It is inevitable that some of the free tools mentioned in this paper may at eventually disappear or require a fee for use. While the tools mentioned above have been selected to meet sub-standards specific to the College of Education at APSU, many of these assignments can be used or modified to address similar standards at other institutions. This course redesign reflects the technology available currently; however, in the field of instructional technology, the current tools very soon become outdated or obsolete. It is exciting to imagine what new tools will be available for the next course redesign.

8 References Betrus, A. (2012). Historical Evolution of Instructional Technology in Teacher Education Programs: A Ten-Year Update. Techtrends: Linking Research & Practice To Improve Learning, 56(5), Betrus, A., & Molenda, M. (2002). Historical Evolution of Instructional Technology in Teacher Education Programs. Techtrends: Linking Research & Practice To Improve Learning, 46(5), Hicks, S., (2011). Technology in today s classroom: Are you a tech savvy teacher? Clearing House: A Journal of Educational Strategies, Issues, and Ideas. 84(5) Oliver, A., Osa, J., & Walker, T. (2012). Using instructional technologies to enhance teaching and learning for the 21st century prek-12 students: The case of a professional education programs unit. International Journal Of Instructional Media, 39(4),