PULLMAN, Wash. — Abbie Brown, assistant professor of educational technology at Washington State University, has received a $1.4 million, three-year grant from the U.S. Department of Education to prepare teachers to use technology more effectively in the classroom.
The grant project, called teach.edu, focuses on restructuring the WSU teacher preparation program to meet the standards for classroom uses of educational technology established by the International Society for Technology in Education. The education department funded the creation of those standards for teachers.
Brown said the teach.edu project has three elements. The first is the involvement of teachers. Brown consults with K-12 teachers to discover what they believe is needed in educational technology training at WSU. He also offers workshops for teachers in educational technology.
Second, through the program, Washington teachers will be able to become actively involved in the Apple Learning Interchange (ALI), a Web site for K-12 teachers nationwide. The ALI provides suggested learning activities and lesson plans for classroom use.
Third, students at WSU will be able to produce electronic learning units that demonstrate educational concepts. Those units will be made available to classroom teachers through the Internet.
The teach.edu project will function as the technical support for the $10 million CO-TEACH program, which is funded by the U.S. Department of Education at WSU to build model teacher preparation programs for the Northwest. The two programs are interwoven, Brown said, and the goal of both is to improve teacher education in Washington.
“I am very excited by this opportunity to work with our partner schools in a way that I could only hope for before this funding arrived,” Brown said.
Brown leads the WSU educational technology program. He is one of a handful of educators nationally with both recent experience as a classroom teacher and doctoral training in instructional technology. Brown received the 1993 New Jersey Governor’s Award for his outstanding teaching, and earned a doctorate in instructional systems technology from Indiana University.
