Technology & The Curry IT Program - State, Local, and National Leadership -
Innovation

Technology & the Curry IT Program

The Curry School's Instructional Technology program is one of the nation's longest-standing and best established programs, celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. The nationally recognized program is at the heart of the Curry School, which has named instructional technology as one of its three primary strengths and focal areas.

In 1984, the Curry School of Education reorganized both the education school and its associated teacher education program. Educational technology was one of three strands (along with special education and multicultural education) designated for integration throughout the teacher education program.

In 1994 the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment identified the Curry School as one of four schools of education judged exemplary for integration of technology.

In 1996 the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) cited the Curry School as a model.

In 1998 the Curry School was a recipient of the first annual American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) Innovative Use of Technology Award based “not on a single innovation or technology, but on a sustained commitment by a broad spectrum of Curry faculty to integration of appropriate technologies over the course of nearly two decades.”

In 2002 the Curry School was a recipient of the Distinguished Achievement Award from the International Society for Technology in Education for exemplary integration of the National Educational Technology Standards.

State, Local, and National Leadership

The Curry School I.T. program serves as a catalyst for national leadership in the profession. The I.T. program collaborated with the Virginia Department of Education to develop the nation's first statewide K-12 Internet system, linking all 2,000 of Virginia's schools in the 1980's. This tradition continues today through the My Teaching Partner program, which links several hundred teachers, faculty, and collaborators in a virtual partnership.

Collaborations involve the design of educational programs throughout Curry School and University. My Teaching Partner, an innovative, Internet-based curriculum and consultancy to support teaching practice, was designed by IT faculty and students, together with Curry faculty from Clinical Psychology, Early Childhood Development, Special Education, and Educational Research. In its first year, over 240 Pre-Kindergarten teachers from across the state of Virginia are participating, with rave reviews.

The Curry Center for Technology and Teacher Education, established by IT faculty in concert with faculty from other disciplines, has served as a catalyst for a number of national initiatives. These include establishment of the National Technology Leadership Coalition (NTLC), a consortium of national teacher educator associations representing the core content areas in science, mathematics, English and social studies. NTLC serves as sponsor of an annual National Technology Leadership Summit (NTLS) held at the Library of Congress each year, and provides editorial oversight for the peer-reviewed journal, Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education (CITE).

The nationally recognized museum education focus includes initiatives with the University of Virginia Art Museum and the Virginia Discovery Museum locally, and the Virginia Science Museum, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Smithsonian, the National Gallery of Art, the National Air and Space Museum, and the National Zoo nationally, along with on-going consultation and collaboration with the Museum of American Frontier Culture and the Children's Discovery Museum.

In the medical school, IT students and faculty collaborate with their counterparts in Internal Medicine (diabetes and prenatal health education), Oncology (cancer risk prevention), Neurology (brain tumor patient education), Nursing (asthma education), Pediatrics (medical education), Health Evaluation Sciences (health risk education: http://www.healthheritage.net), and the Blue Ridge Poison Center, among others.

Innovation and Technology at the University of Virginia

Participants in the IT program benefit from proximity to an unprecedented range of innovative technologies in every discipline. The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities showcases leading edge work by more than 50 scholars in history, literature, architecture, European culture, Asian culture, linguistics, art, film, and cultural studies.

The Virginia Center for Digital History allows students to learn history by doing history as a historian would. For example, the Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the Civil War takes two communities, one Northern and one Southern, through the experience of the American Civil War, creating a social history of the coming, fighting, and aftermath of the Civil War.

The University's Electronic Text Center provides on-line archives of tens of thousands of XML-encoded electronic texts and images with a library service that offers hardware and software suitable for the creation and analysis of text. The Electronic Text Center's holdings include approximately 70,000 on- and off-line humanities texts in thirteen languages, with more than 350,000 related images. Each month more than five million documents are downloaded by more than one million visitors.

The Digital Media Lab, located in the Robertson Media Center, provides equipment and support for the digitization and editing of images, sound and video. Media Lab staff assist students with digital projects and help faculty prepare electronic course materials, with facilities for animation and 3-D imaging, media database development, and web site development.

Technology & The Curry IT Program - State, Local, and National Leadership -
Innovation