Welcome to the Council of Independent Colleges’ (CIC) Teachers for the 21st Century (Teach 21) website, made possible through funding from the Microsoft Corporation. This site contains resources for those who are just beginning and those who wish to explore in greater depth three important topics in higher education today, particularly as they are related to teacher preparation.
The three topics of this website are:
- Multimedia Records of Practice to enable faculty to make public their typically invisible practice of teaching and to support their scholarship of teaching activities;
- Electronic Portfolios to enable faculty and students to reflect upon their learning or professional development or to support program or institutional assessment; and
- Digital Storytelling to enable faculty, students, and others to easily create digital stories with which they may share their reflections on their experiences in learning.
You may gain access to these three topic areas by clicking on the links above.
With the Teach 21 program, CIC established a national faculty development network for faculty members responsible for teacher preparation programs at its member institutions with the generous support of a four-year Mid-Tier grant from the Microsoft Partners in Learning program. During the program’s first two years (2005-2006 and 2006-2007), a group of 19 competitively selected leadership institutions worked to develop the program in collaboration with CIC staff. Each leadership institution was represented by a four- or five-person team of faculty members, drawn both from the education department and other disciplines responsible for teacher education. The leadership teams worked on projects on their local campuses and experimented with various forms of online collaboration tools. This work provided the knowledge base to design the final two years of the project, which was intended to scale the project to additional institutions.
The Teach 21 program was an experiment for CIC, an attempt to create faculty development opportunities at a significant portion of its member institutions at low cost. Not surprisingly, the 19 leadership institutions and CIC’s staff concluded that the only way to accomplish this goal was to use online digital tools to provide these faculty development opportunities. Teams from 47 additional member institutions joined Teach 21 in 2007-2008 and worked together and with domain experts through 2008-2009 in the three areas mentioned above and in a multi-institutional basic research project designed to assess the dispositions of future elementary school teachers toward mathematics.
CIC would like to thank the following contributors to the Teach 21 project and the creators of material on this website:
Edward Barboni (Teach 21 project director and long-time CIC Senior Advisor) is currently Dean of the School of Professional and Continuing Studies at Saint Peter’s College (NJ)
Helen Barrett (ePortfolios and Digital Storytelling) is an internationally renowned expert on ePortfolios and Digital Storytelling
Desiree Pointer-Mace (Multimedia Records of Practice) is an Assistant Professor of Education at Alverno College and an internationally renowned expert on multimedia representations of teaching
Special thanks go to Allyson Knox, our Teach 21 program manager, who is currently Academic Program Manager for Microsoft’s U.S. Partners in Learning
CIC dedicates this site to the memory of the late Russell (Rusty) Garth, formerly CIC’s Executive Vice President, and the designer of Teach 21 with Ed Barboni.
Meet the Presenters:
Desiree Pointer-Mace |
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Helen Barrett |
Visit Desiree's topic on: |
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Visit Helen's topics on: |
View the Full Site Tour by the Presenters:
Desiree Pointer-Mace |
Helen Barrett |
