Blog Juice for Educational Technology

I received a message this morning from a teacher I met a few months ago at a conference in New England. Here is part of the message.

…I am a technology integration specialist in a middle school in Maine. I will be teaching a course for a local private college next semester for pre-service k-8 teachers named “Technology in Education”. I’m playing around with the syllabus right now and was curious what you and maybe your blog and/or podcast community think are the most important concepts college students should know about the uses of technology in the classroom. What essential themes would you teach this course around?

I’d like to cast this out for conversation among the seven or eight people who read this blog. I figure that if you are reading this, then you’ve thought a bit about pre-service education.

I’ll start things with my own thoughts, coming from my unique angle on technology/information literacy. I call it contemporary literacy.

If I were teaching a class, whose goal it is to prepare teachers for contemporary information environment, I’d probably not include a lot of readings, and would probably include only one or two texts. After-all, I do write books.

The syllabus would essentially be a chronology of goals. On this day, you will develop knowledge and competencies in these areas. You will be able to…

It will then be the students’ responsibility to come in with some references to information sources on the topic, a written outline of the ideas they have collected, and evidence that those ideas are valid and relevant.

The bottom line is that teachers should learn to teach themselves within a networked, digital, and overwhelming information environment. Part of discussing their findings and conclusions during the class sessions, would be discussion the strategies that the students used to find the information and to validate and relvate them (new verb).

During the course, teams of two students would select one of the topics from the syllabus and prepare for the end of the course, a presentation, including multimedia support on that topic, including a bibliography and meta-report on the learning process.

What do you think?