Content-specific Faculty Development Research has shown that professional development opportunities directly related to faculty members’ daily activities and teaching are the most successful. In order to stay true to our mission of promoting Learning with a capital 'L' and technology with a lowercase 't', implementation methods were devised to assist faculty in becoming fluent in the use of educational technologies in the classroom. This involved going beyond general training of using equipment or software applications and moving toward content-specific, technology-based instructional strategies for the integration of instructional strategies. One method used to accomplish this was with Teaching and Technology Fellows. Technology Fellows, educational technology doctoral students, were paired with a faculty member in the Colleges of Education or Liberal Arts and Sciences. Together, the team worked together for an extended and consistent period of time. The minimal amount of time the team works together was two academic years. Technology fellows were assigned to the faculty member for up to 15 hours a week. Faculty received a 10% load credit on their workload sheet as well as $1,000 to purchase supplies to assist them in the integration of educational technologies into their courses. During the first year of the grant, there were four Teaching and Technology Fellow Teams. The areas for these teams were science education and English education from the College of Education and physics and German from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. For the second year of the Teaching and Technology Initiative, four additional teams were added to the existing four. These areas were children's literature and early childhood education from the College of Education and mathematics and chemistry from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. View the results of the Teaching and Technology Fellow Pairs (faculty and graduate students) by academic areas. It is important that we evaluated the effectiveness of these partnerships both quantitatively as well as qualitatively. These partnerships led to, among other things, faculty creating and integrating online databases, video case studies, and new curricular units in their instruction. It also led to the design and implementation of three new courses and the creation of several supplemental products designed to support learning in an asynchronous fashion. Details can be found in the specific content areas previously listed. During the past four years of the project, the total number of students impacted by the Teaching and Technology teams was over 5,000. We influenced the ideas students have about using educational technologies in "typical" teaching and learning environments. Faculty and graduate student interviews revealed the importance of content specific support in relation to educational technology integration, that substantial effort was required by both graduate and faculty member to ensures success, and that a positive rapport between the graduate student and the faculty member was essential. See the publications section for an article, Teaching and Technology Teams: An Analysis of a Faculty Development strategy, for a more in-depth look at these teams. For the first three years of the grant, we have held a PT3 Showcase to highlight the activities occurring in the Teaching and Technology Initiative. These showcases grew more impressive each year. During the third year of the grant, 54 students were presenting different activities associated with the grant. Please visit the Showcase page to learn more about these activities. For the fourth year of the grant, the Technology Fellows were removed from the teams allowing the faculty in these teams to begin to build on the knowledge developed over the past two to three years. We were pleased to note that all faculty continued to use technology in their courses and were developing new strategies for integrating technology into their curricula. Another component of the content-specific faculty development portion of the Teaching and Technology Initiative was the Teaching and Technology Incentive Program mini-grants. These grants provided faculty with time and resources to begin or continue the process of effectively integrating the use of educational technologies into their courses. The aim of these grants was to increase the uses of technologies into the course and increase the amount of modeling of educational technologies for pedagogical purposes for preservice teachers. View the results of the TTIP mini-grants by reading the following web page.
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