The Teachers Infusing Technology in Urban Schools project (TITUS) at the University of Illinois at Chicago is developing an approach for addressing the shortage of opportunities for teacher candidates to experience technology being used effectively in high-need urban schools in the course of their field experiences. Beyond recruiting mentor teachers who are already adept at teaching with technology, our work has involved developing communities of experienced teachers within urban schools – prospective mentors for preservice candidates – whom we support in learning to teach with technology. In our first year of intensive work with these groups of potential mentors, we have found a number of assumptions and patterns of interaction that can present problems for infusing technology, and we have explored a number of strategies for addressing them. These challenges often involve a tradeoff between different approaches to professional development. Some of these challenges are presented in the paper, followed by examples of how we have addressed them in our project.

Three teacher education programs were studied to explore the process of integrating computer technology into the curriculum. The focus of this study was to define the stages that schools, colleges, and departments of education experienced as faculty and students moved from lower to higher levels of computer technology use and integration. Data were gathered at the participating sites from three sources: teacher education faculty members, key informants, and focus groups. In-depth interviews were conducted with the key informants and with focus groups (administrator, key informant, faculty member(s), computer technology support person, and student). The gathered data were used to answer the research question: What are the defining characteristics of the stages of development that departments of education experience as they infuse computer technology into the teacher education curriculum? The findings of this research resulted in the emergence of a Five-Stage Model for computer technology integration into teacher education programs: pre-integration, transition, development, expansion, and system-wide integration.