Teachers train in new classroom: cyberspace

"They eliminate the old, one-stop shopping idea where you put a bunch of teachers in the cafeteria for 90 minutes after school and they don't have a chance to get to any depth," says Tim Stroud, director of educational issues for the American Federation of Teachers, of the online technology.

Besides the LAUSD, where hundreds of teachers are using LessonLab technology to improve math teaching, LessonLab technology is also being used by a number of school districts, and universities for mentoring, principal training, coaching, social studies and English language development. The percentage of schools hooked to the Internet in the United States is very high - 98 percent of all schools and 75 percent of individual classrooms. That multiplies the promise of numerous new ideas now being hatched here and in other states such as Connecticut, Florida.

"These applications are coming at a time when there is lots of foment in teacher training, partly because our institutions are not producing enough teachers and partly because the political arena has become more open to alternate ideas in training teachers," says Katy Haycock, director of Education Trust, a Washington D.C.-based education think tank.

Sensing an opportunity, a number of companies are racing to capture the burgeoning market in teacher training. With names like TeachScape, Scholastic Inc., or Classroom Connect, the corporations are quick to tout their competitive features. Some boast of better-quality video or different models of teacher-learning as their strengths. Others play up flexibility for partnering within companies or districts. Pearson Education, the world's largest textbook publisher, is using Lessonlab technology to build digital libraries of demonstration lessons linked to their own textbooks.

But it is the execution of these various strengths upon which the future of web-based video education rests, say observers. Just like any other technology, it is not necessarily the ability of the gadgetry that makes for needed advancement, but how such advances are used.

"Unless other things change as well, such as the organization of schools, the way curriculum is constructed, just these kinds of practical solutions are not going to change a whole lot by themselves," says Rachel Lotan, of Stanford University's teacher-education program.

There are other limitations too, including how ready, able, and willing end users are to fully understand and utilize the new technology. Some will need faster modems and Internet access, and some systems still get overloaded with too many users at once.

But those offering the new ideas say such problems pale in comparison to what can already be achieved.

"This is a new era," says Roy Pea, co-founder of TeachScape. "We've finally made the leap in understanding that teachers don't learn well from reading journal articles or workbooks, they need to see new strategies put into action with real kids that look like their own."

Page: 1 | 2