Faculty Spotlight
September - October 1999
 |
Teaching Online:
|
It may seem odd that ITC is Spotlighting one of their own, but we believe in practicing what we preach and no one exemplifies that more than Julie K. Little, Ed.D.
Dr. Little has many roles at UTK. Not only is she Director of ITC, she is also adjunct faculty for the College of Education and the College of Information Science, she teaches First Year Studies courses, and ITC courses about online teaching and learning. Because Dr. Little teaches in the classroom she can speak to the instructor's experience of incorporating technology in the UTK classroom.
Dr. Little considers herself a "young un" in using computer-based technologies, but she has been incorporating various media technologies in her teaching practice since 1980. While pursuing a doctorate in Humanities Education, she was introduced to instructional technology in a survey course. Read on to hear her story.
Getting Started
"Throughout the course I continued to reflect on the power of the tool in reinforcing concepts presented via linear textbooks - similarly to how I used electronic support materials previous to understanding and accessing computers. Keep in mind this was "pre-Web" - so the tools were basic multimedia authoring and laser-disk audio and video files we could create our own CAI programs (with the hopes of teaching students how to use "this" as a reporting tool of their own). As I explored new tools, new questions of HOW it might be used to support instruction surfaced."I was taking so many instructional technology courses during my doctoral program, it became clear that my focus had changed to examining the use of technologies across the curriculum. I was more interested in those applications that could be communicated to teachers regardless of their area of expertise - applications in terms of management and instruction. If teachers could use computer technologies to facilitate the management side of their practice (databases for student records, electronic gradebooks, email for communicating with other professionals, students, parents and guardians) in an effort to save time in completing these tasks - then teachers might find uses for the growing numbers of computers that were sitting dormant in their schools. Once a "time saving task" was facilitated, then they could migrate towards the instructional applications - whereby the tools are brought into the classroom for student use. As a result, I changed my program focus to instructional technology."
1 of 4 -->