The following comprise our 1999 PT3 Catalyst grant projects. These projects include those affiliated with the Main grant, Transforming Teacher Education through Digital Resource Teams, as well as the two-year supplement to the main award, In Search of Community: The National Technology Leadership Initiative. The descriptions include new initiatives such as handheld computing and open source education which were approved in December 2001 as a change of scope to one element of the main grant.

All of our PT3 projects deal specifically with the preparation of future teachers to employ content-specific uses of technology in their respective disciplines to enable more effective teaching and learning.


Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education (CITE) is a publication of the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education (SITE), established as an electronic counterpart of the Journal of Technology and Teacher Education. Funded by a US Department of Education Preparing Tomorrow's Teachers to Use Technology (PT3) catalyst grant, CITE makes possible the inclusion of sound, animated images, and simulation, as well as allowing for ongoing, immediate dialog about theoretical issues. The journal is a departure from the traditional print journal. It is not simply a print journal distributed electronically. The content can be different. A paper can include video, animation, and audio as well as links to external resources.
Since Year One, Catalyst faculty members have been meeting with representatives from the teacher educator associations in the core content areas to discuss the preparation of teachers to use technology. These include representatives from the Association for the Education of Teachers in Science (AETS), the Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators (AMTE), the National Council of Teachers of English Conference on English Education (CEE), and the National Council for the Social Studies College and University Faculty Assembly (CUFA). Three technology retreats have been held dealing with issues of technology in teacher preparation, digital innovations, and pervasive computing. A fourth leadership retreat is being planned to discuss the issue of open source education.

To expand the influence and usability of the journal, a Digital Scholarship Portal (DSP) is currently under development. This portal will combine CITE Journal with comparable print journals, expanding opportunities for professional dialog regarding articles in those journals. A medium for informal discussion of articles will also be included in the DSP.



The Catalyst Main Grant's goals are to identify sources of innovative and exemplary technology-based learning resources and teaching practices and to restructure teacher education pedagogy through adaptation of these content-based innovations in the Arts and Sciences. These innovations will then be transferred to other teacher education programs through collaborative partnerships. The following are examples of such innovations within the four main content areas.

English Education
Mathematics Education
Science Education
Social Studies Education

When we look to the future, we see in the classrooms of 2012 students who use learner-based tools to collaborate using web linked, wireless handheld technologies. When all students receive their own portable computers with wireless Internet connections, they will shift from a paradigm of minutes of access per week to complete access all day and every day. This, in turn, will permit new instructional paradigms. The following sites demonstrate two such learner-based tools.



We speculate that appropriately equipped handhelds can be incorporated in the teaching of all subjects in ways similar to how graphing calculators are now used in the teaching of mathematics. The plan is to study 6th grade teachers and students using handhelds in both language arts and mathematics (and possibly social studies), and 8th grade students using handhelds in both language arts and science. Widespread access to wireless portable computers will represent a tipping point in American education. At some point the threshold of the price of wireless portable handheld computers will become so low that they will become ubiquitous. Almost all consumer devices from microwaves to cell phones have a price point at which widespread adoption occurs in a short period of time. The same will be true for the spread of portable handheld computers in schools.