After finishing his dissertation in Instructional Technology, the author was offered the opportunity to work with the School of Education at a small, religiously-affiliated university. Just months previously, the NCATE review team had strongly encouraged more and varied integration of educational technology into the School of Education's courses and into the actual teaching of the courses by the established faculty.

        The author inherited a small, out-of-date computer lab of about 15 Macintosh Performa 467s, along with a variety of older Apples, most of which were in the "parts" bin. Soon after the end of the summer term, the Director of Academic Computing managed to arrange for the lab to have 15 new PCs running Windows 98 and MS Office 97. While these new machines were a welcomed addition, they came with a price tag almost out of reach – 10 of the Macintoshes were lost to another lab on campus. The current status of the School of Education's Technology Training Center is 15 new PCs and 5 out-of-date Macintoshes.

        As one can imagine, the size of the class that might work in the lab is extremely limited with this type of configuration. No one wants to work on Macintoshes that won’t run the newest PowerPC software, such as MS Office 98 for Mac, plus these machines are extremely slow. Clock speeds in the Macs are approximately 25 MHz whereas the new PCs are 300 MHz processors with 32 megs of RAM. Part of this dilemma was solved by working with smaller sections of some of the larger classes and by having comparable software, to an extent, on all of the machines, particularly when designing webpages and researching on the ‘Net.

        Additionally, it became the author’s task to allay the technology phobias and apprehensions of the current tenured faculty, while encouraging them to experiment with the technology in a non-threatening environment. What became immediately apparent in the fall 98 course discussions was that most faculty members were aware of MS PowerPoint as a presentation tool, but had little practical experience using it themselves in the classroom. Further, they did not have the expertise to instruct their students in its use, nor did they have the knowledge of how to the evaluate the student's work in this area.

        The author’s observation that MS PowerPoint seemed to be the almost exclusive technology tool used in the School of Education classes had been observed by the NCATE review team as well. The author, because of his extensive background in Instructional Technology from Dr. Charles Dickens, Assistant Professor at Tennessee State University, Nashville, offered a variety of suggestions of alternative technology components and offered the expertise and the computer lab time necessary to teach these new technologies to the School of Education students enrolled in fall classes, both undergraduate and graduate. These suggestions were readily accepted by the tenured faculty members!

        As the various classes have been instructed by the author in the chosen technology components, the response from the faculty has been encouraging. A wide variety of student technology projects have been accomplished and hosted on the web at http://teach.fhu.edu/technology/ . The students are becoming more comfortable with the technology and the teachers are seeing the tremendous benefit to their courses of the technology-based projects. Several teachers have acknowledged their lack of familiarity with the technology and have asked for private tutorials from the author.

        There is wide-spread belief among the school of education faculty that the next NCATE team (Nov. 99) will be pleased with our progress of integrating a variety of technology programs and projects into our classes, both through the work of the students and as modeled by the instructors. But this has not been an easy task. Our current plans are to replace the 5 aged Macs with modern Macintosh G3s. We also intend to have a full computer lab of 15 PCs and 15 Macs. Next would come the software necessary to do the technology projects envisioned by the faculty and staff. While the School of Education has the largest number of majors of any other school on campus, it does not control the purse strings and our Dean will earn his pay getting our lab up to full strength, something that NCATE seems insensitive toward, particularly in smaller colleges and universities.

        NCATE's Current Standards for Technology and Teacher Education, available online at http://www.ncate.org/projects/tech/currtech.html , lists five areas of accreditation standards with expectations for knowledge and use of technology among students and faculty. In addition to these standards for the entire school of education, NCATE recognizes three sets of technology standards for use in accredited institutions: the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (ACET), and the International Technology Education Association/Council on Technology Teacher Education (ITEA/CTTE). Also, new standards for educational administrators, recently developed under the auspices of the National Policy Board for Educational Administration, include specific expectations for the use of technology in instruction, evaluation, and administration, according to NCATE.

Presented at SITE 99 - Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education International Conference. This annual conference offers opportunities to share ideas and expertise on all topics related to the use of information technology in teacher education and instruction about information technology for all disciplines in preservice, inservice, and graduate teacher education as well as faculty and staff development.

Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education is an international association of individual teacher educators, and affiliated organizations of teacher educators in all disciplines, who are interested in the creation and dissemination of knowledge about the use of information technology in teacher education.