Mesa Legend - ARCHIVES - Vol. 39, Issue 6


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Volume 39, Issue 6
November 13, 2001

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Grant to boost tech education for K-12 teachers
MCC to share in 5 year, $9.6 million experiment

BY David Dollins
Mesa Legend

The U.S. Department of Education has given a five-year, $9.6 million grant to three college districts.

Maricopa Community College District, (MCCD), the Miami-Dade Community College District in Miami and Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland have all received funding to implement an experimental program called the Alliance Plus Project.

The Alliance Plus Project, now in its fourth year of operation, is a 30-hour course that trains teachers in grades K-12 statewide in using the Internet and implementing its use in the classroom.

"By teaching this technology to teachers to tutor the students, we’ve found that the students involved in these Internet-based lessons are really motivated," said Fred Thompson, administrative liaison to MCCD’s Think Tank, which is the group that organizes Alliance Plus for Arizona.

"They can access real-time data instead of looking in books where they find information which is probably five to eight years old," he said.

The program has four primary goals.

The first goal is to train over 9,000 teachers statewide which, in turn, will affect more than 25,000 students.

Secondly, Alliance Plus connects the community colleges with K-12 schools in Arizona through the sharing of training resources.

The third goal is to acquaint college faculty and K-12 administrators in the many uses of the Internet to better motivate students and increase their proficiency.

Finally, the program looks to improve the K-16 educational system in giving more support to teachers as they implement technology-based curriculum in their classrooms.

"It’s allowed for our teachers to have a wonderful experience with technology and learn more how to use it in their classrooms and with their students," said Stephanie Mitchell, the technology teacher for Balsz Elementary School in Phoenix.

Mitchell has been teaching with the Alliance Plus Project since its start four years ago.

"The teachers had very limited opportunities to be able to participate in something like this in our district unless they went to a community college or somewhere else and paid for the course work," she said.

The Alliance Plus Project uses three core trainers to train the teachers, who then go back to their own schools and train their teachers on innovative uses of the Internet for their curriculum.

"Our faculty have been able to train on campus and use our own technology, become familiar with it and be less apprehensive to use it with their own students," Mitchell explained.

Alliance Plus stresses four components that enhance the students’ learning experience, which better prepares them to enter college.

These components use real-time data with the students, working on collaborative projects with other students worldwide, using primary sources of information that can only be accessed through the Internet and publishing students’ work on the Internet.

"Students can go into things that can only be done on the Internet," explained Patty Finch, an Alliance Plus core trainer. "They can track ships at sea, learn about different ports of call, perform science experiments and post their results on the Internet and e-mail questions to experts, some even world-famous. All of this motivates students and makes learning exciting."

This experimental program has helped students who do not have the financial resources to own a home computer.

"The only access the students have to computers is at school," Mitchell said. "The more we allow the student use of technology and implement that in all parts of the curriculum, then they’re going to benefit from that tremendously."

The curriculum for the Alliance Plus Project, called "Savvy Cyber Teacher," was developed by the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J. Support for the project also comes from Bank Street College in N.Y., Harcourt Evaluation Services, and the League for Innovation.