Elizabeth Foster, Senior Director of Strategic Initiatives at NCTAF, and Lisa Schmucki, founder and CEO of edWeb.net, appeared on Education Talk Radio in mid-December to discuss technology enabled collaboration. With host Larry Jacobs, the pair shared best practices and lessons learned throughout a multi-year partnership between NCTAF’s and edWeb.net to link student teachers, mentor teachers, and faculty in both face-to-face meetings...

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How does access to an anytime, anywhere network of support change a student teacher’s experience as a learner and an educator?  NCTAF’s TLINC initiative explores what happens when student teachers use mobile technology to call upon their networks of support.  The project was emphasized in two presentations at last week’s 2012 Wireless EdTech conference.   Tom Carroll, NCTAF President, presented about the NCTAF TLINC initiative in a...

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Wireless Helps Teachers Learn and Stay Connected Appeared on July 03, 2012 on OnQ®  Through decades of research, the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future (NCTAF) has documented the importance of collaboration in enabling teachers to improve their practice. Often, however, the norm for teachers in the United States is to work in isolation, cut off from colleagues and from technology that can help them access resources and...

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The Alliance for Excellent Education’s recent paper, “Culture Shift: Teaching in a Learner-Centered Environment Powered by Digital Learning,” articulates the critical need for teacher preparation to focus more on student learning: “Teacher education […] is at a critical juncture. It must be focused less on learning about teaching and focus more directly on teaching for student learning. We have to front-load clinical experiences and...

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In a rural community in Georgia, teacher residents are using tablets provided through NCTAF’s Teachers Learning in Networked Communities 2.0 (TLINC® 2.0) project, which is funded by Qualcomm’s Wireless Reach. These tablets were distributed in an attempt to decrease the isolation of student teachers by facilitating communication and collaboration and by making resources available to these new teachers as they enter classrooms for the first...

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What does it take to integrate technology into teacher education? And how can technology help universities and districts work together? Seven years ago the faculty members and site professors from the University of Colorado Denver and Denver Public Schools (DPS) established a need for greater communication among all the stakeholders involved in teacher education. Though there has been a long-standing Professional Development School Model in the...

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Since 2009, the University of New Mexico’s College of Education (UNM) has been a partner in NCTAF’s Teachers Learning in Networked Communities (TLINC®) project. Through TLINC, our college has been working to support our teacher education programs with increased collaboration, both online and face-to-face, and with added technology resources. Early efforts to integrate technology had been challenging because some faculty members and even...

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Last week, Cindy Gutierrez of the University of Colorado Denver, Carolyn Awalt of the University of Texas El Paso, Jody Britten of the Metiri Group, and Tom Carroll, and I presented at the SITE conference in Austin. Our panel focused on NCTAF’s vision for 21st century teacher preparation in which student teachers are members of dynamic professional communities of their peers, cooperating teachers and university faculty. Teachers Learning...

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What happens when teachers use mobile devices to connect to peers and mentors? This question is the driving force behind the Teachers Learning in Networked Communities 2.0 project that the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future (NCTAF) launched this school year as an extension of the Teachers Learning in Networked Communities (TLINC) project. Read NCTAF’s full post on the Connected Educators Blog Bookmark on Delicious Digg...

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Many thanks to John Merrow for not accepting the overly simplistic argument that because increased use of technology in school doesn’t appear to yield increases in test scores, then technology is not worth the big bucks schools are spending on it. The central tenet of Merrow’s rebuttal of the September 4 New York Times article is right on: “Schools spend billions on technology but use it to do the same old stuff in more entertaining...

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