University of Michigan, School of Education, Fall 1996

Education 603: Technological Capabilities

Fall '96 Topic: Harnessing the Internet To Enhance Schooling

Time: Thursdays, 4-7 p.m.

Instructor: Prof. Jerome Johnston

Loc: Rm 2211 Schl of Education

Campus mail: 5118 ISR 1248

Web: www.umich.edu/~jerej/ED603.html

e-mail: jerej@umich.edu Voice: 763-3079

The focus of this course is on the potential of the Internet to contribute to the solution of selected educational problems. The class begins with an overview of the Internet and Web and an assessment of the value of educational resources and activities currently available on the Web. Students will then examine the many different software tools available today for the exchange of textual, audio, and video information on the Internet, evaluating them for their fit with existing patterns of communication in schools and for their support of educational tasks found in today's K-12 curriculum.

Students will then be introduced to several pedagogical problems in a local school district (see below), examining them for their pedagocial and human factors requirements. Students will then design Internet-based solutions to the problems. If possible, they will try them out with teachers and students. The solutions will be evaluated for their potential contribution to educational practice.

From this course students will acquire facility with a variety of Internet tools, a sense of how easily each can be used by teachers and students, and a sense for the ease or difficulty of orchestrating these tools in the technological climate of today's schools. Students will acquire a framework for judging new developments in electronically mediated communication, based in the needs and constraints of contemporary K-12 educational practice.

The core educational problem for this semester will be use of the Internet to enhance the professional development of teachers. The focus will be on helping teachers in several separate schools implement a new teaching strategy designed to improve inquiry skills of middle school students. The goal is to build a community of learners among these teachers through electronic exchange of text, audio, and video. Additional educational problems will be examined as the size and skills of the class dictate. Problems that have been identified include exchanging scientific data among students in different physical locations (to build on the motivational elements inherent in faceless communication), publishing student products on the Web (to better achieve the goals of a process approach to writing), and Info Webs--using the Web as a "help desk" to answer the questions of new computer users.

Over the course of the semester students and the instructor will develop a series of Web pages that consolidate the class learnings on the various topics of the course. Last updated 9/13/96. The page was created with Claris Homepage (1.0b1).