Push - Pull

By Push I mean what we can do from the teacher education vantage - how do we train and prepare pre-service teachers for the the technology available in our schools?

By Pull I mean what we can do for the classroom teacher's needs via Professional Development - how do we introduce and reinforce best practices in technologically based pedagogy?


In my Push work, I am an adjunct at Teachers College, Columbia University and at Fordham University, preparing teachers not only to use the technology but also to acquire the skills to actually implement these practices in their classroom. The first part has these pre-service teachers create their own webpages in the same way their scholars will - by writing raw HTML code and to provide their URL to their classes. Immediately the scholars are impressed that their teachers actually have webpages. This recognition and acknowledgement from their scholars provides the teachers feedback and encouragement to further their use of the webpage in their practice as new teachers.

In my Pull work, I teach an English class in a high school that serves as a model for teachers to visit and see how it is done. They see the scholars work, they see how a class like this functions, they speak with the scholars to hear from them on the process. After these "Ah-Ha" moments, they are ready to make their pages.

Dinner