In today's classrooms, students see their cell phones, ipods, itouch, and wireless computers as common as students saw pencil and paper thirty years ago,its just there, it always works and it connects them to social communities, information and personal enrichment. Teacher education students are a part of the digital generation as well but they see little connection between their ubiquitous digital life and their role as teachers. Public education has not integrated technology, especially hand held devices, at a significant level. What integration that has been done typically has been designed to support traditional teaching such as power points as lecture supports or individualized learning games which serve as electronic work books.
The slide show below was used to support the presentation shared by Kathryn. The participants were given examples from two different courses which Kathryn utilizes cell phones for automatic voting, web 2.0 blogs and efolios and google documents to address the digital learning styles of teacher education students. Students are then required to create web based projects to share their coursework. The goal is that the web based approaches will challenging the teacher education students to integrate a "new style" of e supported instruction for digital native students in their own classrooms. An example of a course blogger home page can be found at http://standardsofeffectivepractice.blogspot.com/
