February & March 2002

Now that it finally feels like winter in New England, things in the Ready to Teach Project are finally starting to heat up. Next week we will be hosting our third Design Team Forum of the year. It is time to get an update on the six projects that are in the works and help guide the teams through to the finished project so the team units can be taught in our cooperating schools before the end of the year. We will have a showcase of finished products at the end of May.

A pilot program of Electronic Portfolios will be starting with a few students who have recently completed the Graduate Program in Teaching at the university. If the pilot is successful, we hope to expand this to include many more current students during the next academic year. We will be using a software from the company Chalk and Wire as a template for the portfolios.

John Wren has been doing a great deal of training in our multimedia lab, especially with digital video and I movie. He has been working on large-scale projects with classes of students in the GPT program in Elementary Science Methods and Elementary Social Studies Methods. If you need any type of multimedia or technology training, please contact John Wren to make arrangements for individual or small group instruction.

Pat Fontaine, John Wren and myself are preparing a poster session demonstration that we will be presenting at the SITE conference in Nashville, Tennessee in March. We will be explaining the design team process that we have successfully been using in our grant. The collaboration between K-12 cooperating teachers, university faculty and preservice students, resulting in a curriculum unit that is infused with technology and will be taught in an actual classroom will be showcased.