The University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Denver will receive $1.18 million to help future teachers use technology effectively in K-12 classrooms.
The U.S. Department of Education grant will be combined with an additional $1 million from CU-Boulder, $170,000 from DU and $12,000 from the Boulder Valley, Denver, Adams 12 Five Star and St. Vrain school districts.
A major focus of the program will be on future teachers who are interested in working with low-income, high-need children.
"These are the children at greatest risk of missing out as technology becomes more and more important," said CU-Boulder education Professor Michael Meloth, the program's principal investigator. "Wherever possible, we want to link our work with this technology to our work with low-income children to help them prepare for where the jobs are."
The three-year grant announced in June is part of the Department of Education's Preparing Tomorrow's Teachers to Use Technology grants program. The funding will be used to significantly enhance the technology component of the universities' teacher education programs.
"With all this new technology, it takes some thinking about how to use it in a meaningful way," Meloth said. "Our goal is to model for our students how and when technology is best used in classrooms."
To meet this goal, CU-Boulder and DU faculty will revise their teacher licensure programs so that prospective teachers are better able to meet the technology standards established by the Colorado Department of Education and better qualified to use technology in ways that directly improve student learning.
"This grant offers an exciting opportunity for collaboration between a public and a private university," said Professor Jennie Whitcomb, director of the DU teacher education program. "We will be working together on a powerful approach that prepares new teachers to integrate technology into their daily classroom practices."
The co-principal investigators of the program are CU-Boulder education Professors Cinthia Salinas, Valerie Otero and education Dean William Stanley.
CU-Boulder and DU received one of 122 new grants totaling $43 million announced by President Clinton in his June 3 radio address to the nation.
"The ultimate purpose of computers in the classroom is to boost student performance and help children learn," Clinton said. "That can only happen if teachers have the training to best use technology. Today, two out of three teachers with access to a computer say they don't feel well prepared to use it in class. We owe it to America's children to help their teachers become as comfortable with a computer as they are with a chalkboard."
Last year the federal program awarded 225 grants and another $150 million has been requested for fiscal 2001. The goal of Preparing Tomorrow's Teachers to Use Technology is to reach one million educators by the year 2004.
"Well-prepared teachers are the most valuable resource a community can provide to its young people," said Secretary of Education Richard Riley, "and the greatest need for technology-proficient educators is among low-income communities and rural areas still combating a digital divide. These grants aim to ensure that classrooms are staffed with teachers who can help students use these powerful learning tools to succeed in school and prepare for careers in the 21st century."
The CU-Boulder School of Education will contribute about $950,000 to the program with in-kind contributions from the College of Engineering, the Anderson Language Technology Center, the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, the Hughes Initiative and COMPASS, a non-profit agency headquartered in Aspen.