Constructing Community in a Graduate Course about Teaching with Technology

This paper explores the experience of university students and their professors in their quest to create community in an online course about integrating technological applications into the K-12 classroom. The 15 graduate students in this course studied innovations in instructional technology and sought to develop a comprehensive understanding of integrating computer technology into instruction and learning. These 15 graduate students are enrolled in an instructional technology specialist masters program and are practicing teachers or adult learners who want a career as a technology specialist in an educational setting. These students were introduced to the concept of technology as a tool for problem solving and through various reading, lectures and collaborative projects, the students became familiar with hardware and software that helps create multi-dimensional learning with technology. Also, the students were asked to read and reflect on an article about the problems in creating community online and then collaborated with each other and their professor to establish the parameters for a community within this online course. Moreover, the students' experiences in the course and their reflections on the challenges and successes of creating community in a technology oriented online classroom are included. This study shows that message boards, chat rooms, internet lectures and student personal web pages used in conjunction with the instructor's heightened awareness of student needs and vulnerabilities sometimes helped to establish a relationship-oriented, learner-centered online community.