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The PARTNERS Project
Dr. Betty Conaway talks about the grant process and PARTNERS, a distance learning project. By Melissa Burgos Brown SCR*TEC Be sure you read very, very carefully what the grant is asking for and if you have to change your project just a little bit, change the project just a little bit, because having the funds is what enables you to do what you initially wanted to do in the first place. --Dr. Betty Conaway |
 r. Betty Conaway,
Director of the PARTNERS Project and Chair of Baylor University's Department of
Curriculum and Instruction, has been working in education for almost 30 years. She
taught in K-12 schools for 18 years before moving to higher education. She has authored
and received two significant grants for technology. One is the PARTNERS Project and
the other is a newer grant called Virtual Village.
Here she discusses the PARTNERS Project, a grant funded by the State Board for Educator Certification (SBEC) in Texas. It is a collaborative effort to improve preservice teacher education through greater use of distance learning technology in preservice field experiences. PARTNERS was the honored recipient of the first place award from the U.S. Distance Learning Association as the "Organization of Excellence" in 1997. Through the use of distance learning technology, instructors at Baylor are able to evaluate student teachers while watching them in a live classroom setting, teacher ed students are able to watch actual classroom settings live and ask questions, and current teachers are able to interact and collaborate with different schools on projects in a virtual teachers' lounge setting. |
 The PARTNERS Project helps student teachers like this one through distance learning and hands-on work with computers in the classroom. |
First, tell me a little bit about yourself and your background in educational technology.
How did you get interested in it? By necessity. Before I came to the university level, I taught in K-12 schools for 18 years. I taught primarily, in middle schools and high schools, although I taught some elementary. The last high school teaching job I had, I designed and taught the first computer literacy class at that particular school. This was in Louisiana. We then developed the computer literacy class into some BASIC programming and we taught Pascal programming. Then, when I left there they were in the process of making the transition to applications-based technology rather than programming languages. When I left I went to Arkansas as an assistant professor at Arkansas State. I went there in 1989. The university in Arkansas was just beginning to network the campus and to make access to technology easy for faculty. I only stayed one year. And then, I came to Baylor in 1990. When I got to Baylor, the whole campus was already networked! All of the professors had computers on their desk, but it's a MAC world and I had been an IBM person, so I had to quickly learn a whole new system. There is a very, very strong support on this campus, at the university level, for technology and for maintaining as close to the cutting edge as we can, new technology. The only thing that holds us back is money, because we are a private institution and we receive no state money. |
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The PARTNERS Project has been in existence for almost 3 years, can you
talk a little bit about the origin of the grant and your vision for it in
the beginning? This is a Texas-wide movement. I can't take credit for this at all. This is a Texas movement that began in 1992 to revise teacher education all over the state. There are four new areas of emphasis in teacher education in Texas. One is technology. One is multicultural issues. One is additional field experiences prior to student teaching. And the fourth is performance-based assessment of teacher ed proficiency. Those are the four essential components for teacher education as defined by the state of Texas in the early 90s. To encourage universities to revise their programs quickly to meet these four new essential components, the state made a substantial sum of money available for grants and it was available to public as well as private universities. We did not receive our grant until 1995. The first grants were awarded in 1992. So we're on the tail-end of the grants. In many ways that has been to our advantage, because we were able to include lots of distance education, which in 1992 was still a rather primitive technology. So you could talk to a number of other projects at other universities in Texas. Altogether there are 14 centers that are similiar to PARTNERS. At each university that has this kind of a project, the project is slightly different, but it has all four of those components. How that project is implemented, is different at every university. In many respects it was to our advantage that we were not funded until 1995, because by that time, we'd been making applications for this since 1992. We had been talking to teachers. We had been collaborating with school districts, with superintendents, with principals, with everybody we could think of to design our grant proposal so that it would do what the schools needed to do, as well as what we saw we needed to do for teacher education. |
 University professors use distance learning, using both monitors and projectors, as seen here. |
Has your vision evolved or changed as you became more involved in the project?
Yes, my vision has changed because at the beginning I saw this as a very narrow specific project and now I am beginning to recognize, over the last year or so, that there is so much more potential here than I ever anticipated. And I am so much more amazed at the creative ways that the public school teachers are developing to use the technology we put in their hands. I also continue to be amazed at the level of interest in the teacher education students and in their willingness to spend time learning new technology. As a teacher education faculty, we can't keep up with our students and we all recognize that. We are woefully behind our students' learning curve. So in that respect, the teacher education students have become the leaders in technology in the program, rather than the faculty. Can you explain PARTNERS and IDEASnet, how they relate to each other? IDEASnet is the Baylor University distance education network. PARTNERS, the abbreviation, is the short name for the full name of my grant. The grant is actually called The Center for Professional Development and Technology [CPDT]. And, as I said earlier there are about 14 of these all over the state of Texas and we're all called The Center for Professional Development and Technology. So to distinguish us from them, I called ours PARTNERS and PARTNERS also means something. PARTNERS stands for: Partners as Researchers and Technologists Negotiating Educational Reform Strategies. |
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What school districts and organizations are involved in this?
The initial partners, and they are all still partners, were Education Service Center Region 12 (regional collaboratives for school districts and there are 20 in Texas), we collaborated with 12 because it's here in Waco, but we also collaborated with 6 and 4, Texas State Technical College in Waco, McLennan Community College in Waco, The Center for Occupational Research and Development [CORD], and then, all the school districts, and of course Baylor. The number of school districts that we work with has continued to grow. |
 A Baylor student teacher helps out with computer instruction. |
The PARTNERS project does not function in the conventional way that we think of
distance learning, it's not just about one teacher teaching students who are online
from several different locations. I read that teacher ed students involved in this
project get over 750,000 hours of field experience in the teaching process. Can you
talk a little bit about some of the main activities you do because your program
benefits, students, preservice teachers, current teachers, and technology support
teams through the different activities.
We also use our distance-ed equipment to collaborate with teacher ed programs at other universities. The next phase of the distance ed program, which is not in place yet, but we're currently buying the equipment, is to connect elementary classrooms to local and some distant museums, so that they can use the museum materials as a first-hand learning experience. That's the next stage. And the schools are so supportive of that, that they're willing to put some money into it even though PARTNERS is going to run out of money pretty quick. We are connecting with the Institute for Texas Cultures in San Antonio. We are connecting with The Discovery Center, which is a children's museum that is located here in Waco. We helped them get networked so that they can connect with other museums. We have located museums all around the country. Some of them are children's museums. Some of them are not necessarily children's, but just general museums. We are in the process of collecting information about everybody who has distance ed capabilities in museums so that we can make this available to our teacher ed students, as well as to the elementary schools that we have been able to equip. One of the local high schools that we did not purchase equipment for, has it in their plan to purchase distance education equipment, because they want to do some of the same things. Next, in order to make this more available to more school districts, we've helped almost all of our school districts to get connected to the Internet. Texas State Technical College, in Waco, which is a two year tech-prep college, has been most helpful in helping school districts get connected to the Internet. We can't connect them through Baylor's connection, there are legal issues and we're a private university and they are a public school and so forth. So each district is connecting on their own, but Texas State Technical College, who is a partner in the project, has been providing assistance. They're a public school. The next stage in the distance ed is to make this connection to the museums, but we are also in the process of purchasing portable distance ed units. And the new portable distance ed units are in, we had some beta units on loan from VTEL [Corporation] and we've experimented with them. They're wonderful. They are the size of a medium-sized television and you can literally pick them up and carry them around. And you just plug it in wherever you have an Internet connection. You have to have a computer there to help, but you just literally plug it in. And so, we are purchasing several of those so that we can loan them to elementary schools and other schools who do not want to make the purchase on their own, but who have Internet access and who want to use the distance ed capability. |
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So the schools are going to continue with the project activities?
All of the schools we're working with are determined. Several things are continuing. One item that's continuing is one essential component, takes no money, but a lot of effort, is that the teacher ed faculty will continue to collaborate with K-12 teachers and the K-12 teachers assure us that they will continue to collaborate with us to design field experiences prior to student teaching and to assist in continuing to develop their local technology. The second thing that's continuing is that many of the school districts we work with have already spent a considerable amount of money to support the technology that PARTNERS has been able to provide for them. So that support is expected to continue. |
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And all of
these ideas started with the teachers and the two technologists at those schools who
were just chatting over the distance ed line to check out connections and be sure the
audio worked and so forth.
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What about staff development for current teachers, what type of training has
the project made possible in that area? The virtual teachers lounge is something the teachers came up with on their own. When Harker Heights Elementary, which is 60 miles south of Waco, and the Hillcrest Professional Development School here in Waco, got their distance ed equipment, they left it on a lot. They were testing the lines. There's one charge per month anyway and they were experimenting. What happened was that teachers would wander in to see it and realize that there were other teachers at the other site. So they started talking to each other. And at first it was just "How are you? Isn't this neat?" and so forth, and then they started planning projects to do together. And as a result, the school has a collaborative project probably about once every 60 days! The teachers and the students at Hillcrest Professional Development School work with the ones at Harker Heights Elementary, which is in Killeen. For the last presidential election they did something special, for the Olympics, they did something special. They have an ongoing contest using Lemonade Stand software which is available on the Internet. And all of these ideas started with the teachers and the two technologists at those schools who were just chatting over the distance ed line to check out connections and be sure the audio worked and so forth. The two technologists, the one at Hillcrest and the one at Harker Heights have been key. They have been so supportive and they have gone out of their way to learn how to use this equipment and to think about and to find innovative ways to use the equipment and I cannot say enough positive things about both of them. |
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I also read about La Vega school district in Waco, they aren't involved in the
distance learning part of the project but through PARTNERS have made some great strides
to incorporate technology into their schools, can you talk about that?
Since we have been collaborating with them, they have managed to network all of their campuses. They also have an Internet connection that Texas State Technical College helped them with and it's an Internet connection that is based on a satellite tower. They are all networked. There is a computer on every teacher's desk. Many classrooms have multiple computers. They have two very strong district technology coordinators. They are a very small district and they don't have campus technologists, they have two for the whole district. They are also extraordinarily supportive of PARTNERS. We've worked together and shared the costs of a lot of things they've wanted to do. For instance, we shared the cost of upgrading their library's record-keeping system. We've shared the cost of lots of staff developments. We've sent lots of teachers to national technology conferences and many times, not just La Vega, but other school districts also, have shared the costs. |
 Student teachers work on computers in the classroom. |
Do you have any advice for K-12 educators who are applying for ed-tech grants? It is so much easier now to find information about available grants because everything is on the Internet. You have to search for the resources that list the grants that you might be eligible for and don't stick with government grants. Government grants are very important, but many private foundations are making grant awards also. I have another grant, Virtual Village, that's being funded for $150,000 from a private foundation and Virtual Village is another technology-based project, but it's very different from PARTNERS. So don't give up when you apply, keep applying. Be sure you read very, very carefully what the grant is asking for and if you have to change your project just a little bit, change the project just a little bit, because having the funds is what enables you to do what you initially wanted to do in the first place. And little changes in your design are not going to make any difference in the long run. Right now, the current climate in grant awards at both governmental levels and foundation levels, the key word is collaboration. So the more people, the more different kinds of entities you can pull into your grant application, the better off you'll be. |
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Finally, is there anything else you'd like to add? Yes, I wanted to mention that Baylor University has been exceedingly supportive of PARTNERS from the very beginning. If it wasn't for the university none of this would have happened. For instance, the computer information resource on campus that coordinates all of our computer access, assigned one person to work on distance education for two years. He had no other responsibility. If it hadn't been for him, that's Tim Logan, if it hadn't been for Tim, none of this distance ed stuff would have happened. Chris Jones is terrific, but he could not do it on his own because he wasn't connected to the infrastructure of the university for technology. |
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