Professional: Elementary Tech Ed

|Practicuum||Elem TE||Curriculum||Methods||Student Teaching|

School reform efforts have focused on the need to prepare a more technologically literate citizenry that is capable of thinking broadly and creatively, solving technological problems, and making informed decisions. Technology education in the elementary school has the potential to target this need by providing students with exciting, challenging, and meaningful educational experiences that develop these skills and demonstrate practical applications of math, science, language arts, and other school subjects. The new generation of elementary school teachers and technology education teachers needs to be prepared to develop and implement an interdisciplinary curricula that can do this. This course provides unique opportunities for aspiring elementary school teachers or administrators and technology educators to develop these skills and understandings.

Students in this course investigate techniques for integrating technology education with the regular elementary level curriculum. The course outlines a rationale for elementary level technology education and acquaints students with numerous and varied approaches for using technological activities to teach and apply concepts and skills from math, science, social studies, language arts, health & physical education, and the fine arts. Students learn how these interdisciplinary techniques can be used in elementary classrooms to promote better understandings of all subjects and to increase students’ curiosity and motivation to learn. Students also develop design and problem-solving abilities, build basic technical skills, and explore new and innovative ways of teaching young children about the technological world in which we live. This is a highly experiential, hands-on approach to integrating technology with the elementary curriculum.

Course Goals
Students will:

1. Become familiar with local, state, national, and international technology education curricula from grades Pre-kindergarten (PK) through grade 6.
2. Experience and evaluate design and technology activities by using simple tools, materials, processes, and systems to solve technological problems and to create useful teaching and learning activities and media.
3. Improve and enhance fundamental technological understandings as they relate to the elementary curriculum and technology education goals.
4. Utilize appropriate experiential teaching techniques and methodology to effectively convey technological concepts to young children in a meaningful and interesting manner.
5. Discover ways to create an interdisciplinary teaching environment through the integration of technological activities with other areas of the curriculum (e.g., math, science, language arts, social studies, fine arts, health, and physical education.)
6. Help to plan and implement in a local elementary classroom.

Students in this course have experiences with:

• The technological design and problem-solving process
• Technology activity development (writing objectives, creating innovative teaching strategies, etc.)
• Product design and development
• Basic technical processes (sketching, cutting, drilling, building, assembling, etc.)
• Simple circuit building
• Various computer software packages (Print Shop, David Macaulay’s The Way Things Work, Kid Pix, etc.)
• Robot programming
• Various educational building kits (LEGO, K’NEX, Capsela, Inventa, Linx System, etc.)

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