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$3.4 million in grants awarded to new IU center to help teachers better use technology
Oct. 4, 1999
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Two national grants totaling more than $3 million have been awarded to the Indiana University School of Education's newest research center. The funding will be used to explore ways to help K-12 teachers use technology to improve their teaching.
The Center for Research on Learning and Technology (CRLT) was awarded more than $1.8 million by the National Science Foundation for the project "Internet Learning Forum: Fostering and Sustaining Knowledge Networking to Support a Community of Science and Mathematics Teachers." The U.S. Department of Education granted the center more than $1.6 million for the project "Learning to Teach with Technology Studio."
Professor Thomas Duffy of the school's Department of Instructional Systems Technology (IST) is serving as project director for both grants. His co-principal investigators on the NSF grant are Assistant Professor Sasha Barab and Professor Don Cunningham of IST and Professor Rob Kling of the IU School of Library and Information Science. For the Department of Education grant, Duffy is sharing principal investigator duties with a colleague at the University of Colorado-Denver.
CRLT aims to promote and support a community of scholars dedicated to research on the design, use and implementation of technology to improve learning. Duffy, the School of Education's Barbara B. Jacobs Chair in Education and Technology, directs the center, with IST faculty members Barab and Martin Siegel as associate directors.
Duffy characterizes the CRLT as a "very collaborative community" whose two new research projects involve researchers from around the country.
The NSF project involves the design and evaluation of an electronic knowledge network, the Internet Learning Forum (ILF), to support an online community of math and science teachers. A professional development tool at heart, ILF will incorporate video-streaming technology to allow teachers to "visit" other teachers' classrooms and engage in conversation about teaching practices with fellow teachers.
"The ILF design centers around the vision of a community in which teachers can virtually visit each other's classrooms to observe and discuss approaches to teaching mathematics and science topics," Duffy said. He added that the research goal of the ILF project is to understand the principles for fostering, sustaining and scaling communities of practice in which the value to participants of sharing their practice and entering the dialogue outweighs their "costs" such as time, technology access, or the concern of letting others view their teaching.
The second project, "Learning to Teach with Technology (LTT) Studio," is funded through the Department of Education's "Learning Anywhere Anytime" program. According to Duffy, many of today's teachers feel uncomfortable incorporating technology into their lessons.
"In 1999, the National Center for Education Statistics found that 80 percent of pre-K-12 teachers do not feel prepared to integrate technology into their curricula," Duffy said. "One of the reasons for this ill-preparedness is a lack of relevant courseware for both pre-service and in-service teachers -- courseware that often focuses on learning about technology rather than learning to teach with technology."
The LTT studio seeks to develop an Internet-based environment to support teachers in learning to use technology in their teaching. During the course of the project, CRLT will lead a partnership consisting of EDUCAUSE (an educational computing association for higher education), Western Governors University, University of Colorado-Denver and Phi Delta Kappa. Participants will provide a range of learning modules that will support teachers in integrating technology into the curriculum consistent with local, state and national standards, in providing leadership in the use of technology at a building level, and in addressing the ethical issues involved in access to and use of technology.
"While the LTT studio will be broad in scope," Duffy said, "its focus will be on the use of technology to support student inquiry and problem solving."
(Ceci Jones, School of Education, 812-856-8031, ccjones@indiana.edu)