School of Education to study technology use

The IU School of Education will partner with the Granato Group, a Washington, D.C.-area company, in a $3.1 million project that will assess the use of technology in classrooms nationwide from now until April 2009.\nThe project, titled “Leveraging Education Technology to Keep America Competitive,” will help federal officials allocate funds for classroom technology.\nJonathan Plucker, project manager of the study and director of the IU Center for Evaluation and Education Policy, said the project will reveal how technology is changing the way students learn.\n“A common criticism is that (technology is) not really changing the way that we teach or the way that students learn,” Plucker said. “This study gives us the resources to ... figure out if those things are happening.”\nThe School of Education’s role in the study will mostly involve evaluating how teacher education programs train future teachers to employ technology in the classroom.\nIU will gather information for the study by sending researchers to various schools where they will evaluate the kinds of technology made available to teachers, as well as how teachers incorporate this technology in their lesson plans. Researchers will then evaluate the effect this technology has on student involvement, responsiveness and academic performance.\nThomas Brush, a researcher for the study and an associate professor in the School of Education, said the study will give education professors better ideas on how to teach instructional technology to education students.\n“We can use that information to help the Department of Education in examining ... what teacher preparation programs are doing,” he said. “But (we can) also inform our program at IU how we can prepare our future teachers.”\nAnne Ottenbreit-Leftwich, a School of Education professor and project researcher, said she is excited to be a part of a cutting-edge study that will hopefully shed new light on how to better equip teachers to reach students of the technological age.\n“It means a great deal,” Ottenbreit-Leftwich said. “We feel responsible in order to make sure technology is implemented in the schools to make an impact on student learning.”\nFor more information about the project or other studies conducted by the IU Center for Evaluation and Education Policy, visit www.ceep.indiana.edu.