Which Came First-The Technology or the Pedagogy? A New Spin on an Old Riddle Goes to the Heart of a Conflict between K-12 Schools and the Colleges of Education Responsible for Cultivating and Providing Them with New Teachers

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] WHY IS GENERATION of teachers more knowledgeable about technology than any before it arriving in classrooms with little understanding of how to teach with it? a debate that, according to Ann Thompson. director of Iowa State University's Center for Technology in Learning and Teaching, has K-12 and higher ed engaged in mutual finger-pointing. districts say, 'If colleges of education just better prepared new teachers in technology, we'd be all set. but they're not doing their job,' Thompson says. Colleges of education say, 'We're doing a great job, but then students go out into schools and they don't have access to technology or don't see other teachers using technology, so some of this prep goes to waste,' Thompson believes that on their end, colleges of education can help cross that chasm by instilling in preservice teachers a sense of humility for their first year or two in the classroom and deference for veteran faculty members. It's important that they understand that they may bring a lot of technical expertise, but that they have a lot to learn from the [other] teachers in schools in terms of pedagogy and content, she says. Thompson also concedes that higher ed has been guilty of paying too much attention to the devices themselves. We all did at first: 'If we just teach teachers how to use technology, they'll figure out how to teach with it.' Although it was an understandable approach, it really wasn't the approach we should be taking. Glen Bull, co-director of the Curry School of Education Center for Technology and Teacher Education at the University of Virginia, is more blunt. A Smart Board doesn't teach anything, he says, noting that at his institution, knowing how to operate a device is a baby step toward understanding tech integration. Five years of prep are what we think are needed to take advantage of it. Tying Technology to Topic five years of prep Bull refers to is the Curry School's five-year program that integrates subject-matter education with teaching expertise, coordinating students' undergraduate and graduate work. student's undergraduate major is matched by that same area of concentration in the education program. With the help of academic advisers on both ends, preservice math majors, for example, will focus their education studies on math teaching. At the end of the five years, students receive from the university both a bachelor's degree in the given subject matter and a Master of Teaching degree. program has since evolved to include technology as a content area. The formal expression of this is 'technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK),' Bull says. says that you have to know three things to use technology well. You first have to know the content. going to be hard to teach calculus if you don't know calculus yourself. You also need to know the pedagogy associated with that content--the instructional strategies that will be effective. Finally, you need to know the innovation or technology that you're going to then use. Math teachers, he explains, might need to know how to integrate Geometer's Sketchpad into lessons. If you were in language arts, you might need to learn about digital storytelling. In social studies, you'd learn about the use of primary source documents at the Library of Congress. grounded in the subject. Iowa State's education program also adheres to the TPACK approach, which Thompson says is a dramatic change from earlier methods that focused on the tool, not the instruction. When we first started this venture, a lot of what we did was teaching them how to do things like use a spreadsheet, she says. What TPACK does is help to get us away from emphasizing technology. There's very little emphasis on how to blog, how to create a wiki, how to create a digital story. emphasis now is on how to use storytelling in a classroom situation, how to create a lesson where students are using blogging in a classroom. …