A technology explosion at the Warner School has had a significant impact on teacher education, research, and thinking about the role of technology in learning and mediating culture.“Four years ago, Warner faculty made a commitment to take the steps necessary to ensure that the teachers we graduate are able to use technology to support student learning and achievement,” explained Dean Raffaella Borasi.

Fueled by a $725,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Preparing Tomorrow’s Teachers for Technology program and supported by partnerships with area K–12 schools, Warner set an ambitious agenda for faculty development, infrastructure and administrative
supports, and curriculum development designed to better support teacher educators and prospective teachers in their use of technology as a teaching and learning tool.

“Preparing technology-proficient teachers is not simply about learning technology skills,” explains Borasi. “Teachers need to have the capacity to integrate technology into subject matter content using what is known about effective pedagogy while demonstrating an appreciation of how available educational technologies can transform the teaching and learning of specific subject matters.” It is also important that teachers have a critical understanding of the potential, as well as limitations, of technology to enhance teaching and learning with diverse students and in a variety of instructional contexts.

Warner faculty and students break with tradition and regularly ask one another at the start of a project or a course: What should we teach and how? How can technology help us do that better? How can technology help us bridge, rather than widen, current achievement gaps?

“New technologies are powerful tools when used in ways that help students make sense of their world and to act upon that world,” explains Ellen Santora, principal investigator for the grant and Warner assistant professor. “They can assist students in collaborative problem solving, researching, discovering meaningful relationships, constructing and disseminating new knowledge, and communicating and collaborating visually and verbally with one another and with others around the globe.”

One of the foundational principals of Warner’s approach to preparing technology-proficient teachers is that prospective teachers must have opportunities not only teaching with technology but also learning with technology. In social studies education, for example, Santora assigns the production of 10-minute video documentaries of a person, place, or event prominent in Rochester history.“This activity allows prospective teachers to engage in historical inquiry in ways that are more in line with students’ natural propensity to work with new technologies and assists them in deconstructing the work of those who produce documentaries from a critical perspective,” she points out.

Similarly, as media literacy becomes an increasingly important component of English education, assistant professor Meg Callahan has found that providing students with the opportunity to produce media themselves gives them first-hand experience in understanding the kinds of decisions that shape a story, a commercial, a documentary, or other media production.

As students bring their diverse creative, visual, and technical skills to the table, the dynamics of the classroom change to create a community of learners. Callahan suggests technology provides unique opportunities “to build on and respect students’ knowledge base while still teaching them how to write clearly, read thoughtfully, and think ritically.”

Assistant professor Nancy Ares is exploring the use of networked technologies to engage students in rigorous math and science learning. Classrooms at Rochester’s East High School serve as research and field- testing sites for a system using networked graphing calculators being developed by Texas Instruments.

“These classrooms provide unique contexts for examining participation of underserved students and issues of culture in design and use of educational technologies.” Ares continues,“Research associated with this networked technology considers the cultural practices of students within these classrooms and the potential to leverage this knowledge to enrich math and science learning.”

In the end, the sharpened focus on technology is really not about the technology per se, but on how powerful it can be as a tool for active student learning. “The PT3 grant was a catalyst to transform the culture at Warner about technology and the use of technology,” says Dean Borasi. “In effect, we had the opportunity to put into practice all that we know about professional development and education reform to fundamentally change the way we think about the role of technology in education. And in the process, it really changed the way we think about how we do all our work, incorporating much wider and more creative uses of technology in our teaching, research, and operations.”

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