About PT3 @WMU Vision The Western Michigan University's Preparing Tomorrow's Teachers to Use Technology program is part of a university and community wide comprehensive effort to engage pre-service education students in learning through technology in order that they will be able to prepare their future K-12 students to meet the demands for a highly technology-dependent workforce. A technology proficient workforce that is now the prerequisite for the region's, the state's and the nation's economic growth and community well being. It is the ambitious goal of this program to ensure and document that the graduating WMU pre-service teachers each year meet or exceed, and practice rigorous standards of collaborative learning practices for integrating technology in the classroom. After seven years, it can be reported and clearly documented that we are executing well on this determined vision. This massive, far-reaching effort involves a public-private partnership with active financial matching support, and/or personal involvement from IBM, Adobe, Microsoft, the Think Quest Foundation, Smartforce, Task Stream, as well as over 50 Southwest Michigan K-12 schools. This university wide effort has involved, and in turn impacted, the WMU College of Arts and Sciences, College of Fine Arts, College of Education, Office of Institutional Research and the Office of Information Technology. The WMU PT3 program has broken new ground in the following ways: Milestones 1. The first large group (500) of students in the College of Education to produce electronic portfolios, which detail and document their technology competences. 2. The first group of students in the university to test http://homepages.wmich.edu, a totally new student friendly web site development project, jointly developed by the Office of Informational Technology and PT3 program staff. 3. The first pre-service students in Michigan and among the first in the nation to use a Profiler survey for documenting self-evaluation mastery of the ISTE standards with individual ISTE based performance indicators support by on-line training materials. 4. The first large group of preservice students to use and help develop Taskstream.com for teaching pre-service students to use a set of on-line curriculum development tools for integrating both technology and state and national standards into project-based lesson plans. 5. The first large group of pre-service students in the nation to develop and submit collaborative teacher preparation and teacher material web sites to the new PT3 catalyst supported, national ThinkQuest on-line curriculum resource library. 6. The first group of faculty (along with only four other U.S. universities and colleges) to develop a new ThinkQuest Guided Partner process for training preservice teachers to develop collaborative web sites for engaging students in dynamic interactive learning. |