|
General Faculty Development
For faculty to effectively model the use of
educational technologies to teacher education
students, the faculty must have a level of comfort
with using educational technology. In addition,
faculty must be familiar with effective
instructional strategies for using educational
technologies in the classroom environment. The
training to equip our faculty with these
fundamental skills and pedagogical knowledge occurs
primarily in the Office of Instructional
Technology.
Year
One:
In order to best meet the needs of faculty, a needs
assessment on the College of Education faculty was
conducted to determine their concerns about using
educational technologies in their classrooms. The
Concerns-based Adoption Model Stages of Concern
questionnaire was used to provide us with this
information. (Results from this survey can be
observed in the Year
One Evaluation section of this web site).
Results indicated the highest levels of
concern by College of Education faculty were at the
awareness, information, and management stages of
the SoC questionnaire. Therefore, it was entirely
appropriate that multiple opportunities for a
variety of workshops were offered. Current
workshops offerings can be found at http://www.coe.ufl.edu/oet/fdmenu.html.
Faculty also have multiple online resources
available to them. At the Online Support Center,
faculty could assess tutorials such as learning how
to burn a CD, use Fetch, and design web pages. The
online tutorials are located at http://www.coe.ufl.edu/oet/onlinetut.html.
Finally, faculty members have an opportunity for
one-on-one consultations with staff in the Office
of Instructional Technology. During the first year
of the grant, faculty requested 35 hours of
individual consultation in addition to general
workshops.
Year Two:
Great progress continued to be made in assisting
faculty to integrate educational technologies into
the teaching of their courses as well as general
productivity. During the academic year 42 workshops
were offered and summer workshops were also held
for faculty. In addition, interest in one-on-one
consulting increased substantially this year.
Faculty requested and received 126 hours of
consultations resulting in faculty redesigning
their courses, and improving asynchronous
opportunities for student learning throughout the
semester. This was a significant increase from year
one of the Teaching & Technology Initiative.
Specific activities in the Office of Instructional
Technology can be found at the Office
of Instructional Technology web site.
Year Three:
Faculty continued to make progress with the
integration of technology into their courses. The
Office of Instructional Technology again found that
faculty wanted more one-on-one consultations and a
wide variety of online tutorials. Therefore, Dr.
Gail Ring and her staff happily responded to this
need. Numerous online tutorials can be found on the
Office of Instructional Technology web site. In
addition, the Office of Instructional Technology
took over the check-out of the carts of laptops
that faculty can use in their rooms with students.
The ECHO database was established to make the
availability of these resources easy for faculty.
The Office of Instructional Technology continued to
provide informative workshops which can be easily
accessed by faculty, staff, and graduate students.
View the Office
of Instructional Technology's redesigned web
suite to see how they are better servicing the
faculty, students, and staff within the College of
Education.
Year Four:
Dr. Gail Ring, who ran the Office of Instructional Technology, took a faculty position at Ball State University. Nevertheless, the Dean's Office valued the work being done by Dr. Ring and her staff. The Dean's Office took over the funding of this office and providing general faculty development to faculty within the College of Education.
|
