Chapter 19: Mentoring a Teacher Preparation Faculty Toward Technology Integration

How do you convince professors to infuse technology into their university courses? After seven years of persuasion, collaboration, and modeling, a teacher preparation faculty (both university and K–12) was moving slowly toward adopting technology as an instructional strategy. They had adopted a vision of technology use, expecting it to be integrated across the teacher preparation program. Unfortunately, when it came to implementing that vision, too many faculty members opted out. The process side of technology was in place, but the use of technological tools was not coming along as rapidly. Most of the faculty members lacked either the skills or confidence to use the tools, did not see why they should introduce the tools to their students, or felt that technology was not within the scope of their course. I describe how technology integration in the teacher preparation program at the University of Colorado at Denver has changed over the past nine years and the initiatives that contributed to those changes.