Columbia University 

Engineering School GK12 Teaching Fellows Project

Integrating New Media Technologies into Teacher Development

Track 2

The Technology Integration Partnership (TIP), a k-12 project of Columbia University’s Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS) funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), has 4 major goals:

(1) to increase the access to, and integration of, new technologies into the curriculum of STEM teachers working in urban environments;

(2) to deepen the science, math and engineering content knowledge of these teachers;

(3) to bring the excitement of emerging STEM research to 5-12^th grade students, offering them a window into future academic and career paths; and

(4) to interest and excite STEM graduate students about education, giving them unique opportunities to improve their teaching and communication skills.

An integral objective of this project is advancing the understanding of how to best integrate instructional technologies into classrooms. Our goal over the five years of the Track 2 grant is to further develop three technologies we used in Track 1: probes, robotics, simulations, and introduce additional technologies: engineering design, educational games, simulations, visualizations, and remote lab experiments.

New technologies are interactive by nature. Students learn by constructing knowledge through hands-on experiences (e.g., with robots and probes) and virtual experiences (e.g., with simulations, visualizations and games). The Fellows, helping to motivate and excite students by providing one-on-one and small-group interactions in classrooms, spend one full day each week in a host school, working with teachers and developing lessons using new technologies.