The electronic magazine you are reading was created by graduate students in educational technology at the University of Michigan. Some are on the job in various teaching and administrative jobs in the public schools; others have come back to campus full time to pursue their studies. All of them have faced the imperious demands of teaching in K-12 schools and trying, at the same time, to find time and opportunity to learn about new ways to teach and improve their skills.
This fall they were all enrolled in a course designed to familiarize them with current views on the technological capabilities of computers. With the knowledge they already have of the enterprise called school, the course helps them explore how computers could contribute more to the educational enterprise.
In the 1980s this course examined what were then novel developments in the computer hardware arena, always with a focus on how these might enhance the learning opportunities for K-12 students. For the last four years the course has examined various aspects of what may be the most profound technological development of the decade: the Internet and the World Wide Web. Earlier versions of the Internet course focused entirely on assessing the value of the Web for K-12 students. This year the group examined its potential to contribute to one of the most pressing problems in education: professional development for teachers.
For the class, students had to both master many Internet tools and think carefully about the problem of professional development--a tall order in a single course. Their first synethsis of the many ideas came with oral presentations at the last class which they organized by turning a Web site into a PowerPoint organizer. The next step was to create this magazine: the major task of their final exam.
The magazine is divided into two parts. The first systematically explores a collection of Internet tools and how each might contribute to the formal enterprise of teacher professional development. The second assembles and then analyzes various collections of Web sites and assesses their value for educators: K-12 teachers, researchers and administrators.
In the final assessment, these teachers expressed a mixture of excitement about the possibilities of the Internet (and their own growing mastery of the medium), with an appreciation for how far public schools are in 1996 from having the ease of access and use represented by older technologies such as the telephone and the television. (Even these 50-100 year old technologies are missing from most classrooms!)
In the "chapters" that follow you can judge for yourself the potential of the Internet and Web to help today's teachers enhance their skills and add to their resources to improve the lot of today's students.
Professor Jerome Johnston
12/20/96
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