Implementing a University level computer education course for preservice teachers

Abstract

The long recognized problem of teacher retraining in computing has received considerable attention over the past several years. For the computer to be introduced in the classroom, teachers in the field had to be retrained to teach with and to teach about this new technology. The retraining of teachers, however, is not the only problem that needs to be addressed. We need to be serving the needs of teachers who are now being prepared to go into the classroom, that is, the preservice teacher, so that he or she is not immediately faced with a retraining need upon graduation. The elementary school teacher (and all teachers for that matter) receive their preservice training at the University level. It is imperative that the graduates of our universities receive an adequate background in the utilization of the computer in the classroom prior to their graduation. It is unfortunate, however, that even though computing technology is pervasive in the pre-college market, the training of elementary school teachers at the university level in computer utilization is lagging far behind. Why is the university system failing in its efforts to prepare teachers for computing technology? That question and other issues will be addressed here. Problems range from those at the global university level down to those involving the actual content of courses being taught. In between are problems to be faced by the College of Education, by the department offering computer education coursework, by faculty teaching the developed course, and by those charged with providing the laboratories for the prospective teacher. We concentrate on issues that are more politically related and not so much on the curriculum content, realizing that the content of the training course work is driven in large part by the content of pre-college level curricula and by hardware advances. We leave these issues to later work, pending results of other developmental efforts.