Submitted by:
Deborah Little
Project Coordinator
Department of Educational Psychology
University of Illinois
1310 S. 6th St.
Champaign, IL 61820 USA
v: (217) 244-0537
f: (217) 244-7620
e: d-little@uiuc.edu
Categories:
Education, K12; Education, higher; Research, academic
Keywords:
Innovative or improved ways of doing things; More equitable access to technology or electronic information; Creation of new ideas, products, or services; Leverage of public funding; Partnerships between public and private sector
Supporting Documentation (contact author for more information):
Other: electronic mail messages
The Story:
This story was collected as part of the “Teaching Teleapprenticeships” research project at the University of Illinois, sponsored by the National Science Foundation.
The professor for a Junior level science methods course was excited by the prospects of his six students sharing Macintosh portable computers. These secondary science education majors are in the schools for a field experience during this spring semester. Face-to-face meetings with students are scheduled once a week, so the professor planned to use e-mail as a means of fast efficient delivery of course information, special notices, methodology questions, special problems and the like. Last spring, 1992, students in this course made heavy use of electronic communications and the professor anticipated a similar situation.
This spring, in addition to using electronic communications, students have been exploring other uses of technology in the school setting as an aid to classroom instruction. One university student has been using the portable to show high school students how to store, analyze and graph data from lab experiments and then to write up lab reports. Her students use a Macintosh in the science room at their school to enter, analyze and graph their data, and write up reports. Another university student is using the portable to organize lessons and have high school students watch the monitor as they go through the lesson, in the same way that a teacher might use an overhead projector. University students are also using the portables in the more conventional ways, such as developing and printing out lesson plans, worksheets and tests. These students are finding that combining these uses with the communication uses gives them additional power in their student teaching.