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Although there has been much debate about "what" teachers need to know about technology, less attention has been paid to "how" they are supposed to learn it. Teacher preparation programs need to go beyond merely training teachers in how to use specific software and hardware tools, and instead focus on developing an understanding of the complex set of interrelationships between artifacts, users, tools, and practices. In this paper, we introduce and advocate a "Learning By Design" approach that can help teachers develop a flexible and situated understanding of technology. In this approach, inservice teachers work collaboratively in small groups to develop technological solutions to authentic pedagogical problems. We introduce the Learning by Design strategy and provide examples of its use in three different courses. We summarize what teachers learn in this approach, focusing on learning about technology, learning about design, and learning about learning.

This paper examines the use of social media to foster community connections within the MSU Urban Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) program. We describe the strategies employed by the program and the technologies employed by instructors to provide support, build community, and showcase learning. We highlight three particular tools used to foster community within the program: Facebook, websites and blogs, and Twitter and then use trace data from Twitter to demonstrate how social media fostered community within the program. We conclude with a description of implications for how social media is used to support community for future research and practice.

In 2010 Michigan State University launched the first hybrid doctoral program in Educational Technology. This 5-year program blends face-to-face and online components to engage experienced, working education professionals in doctoral study. In this paper, we describe the design and evolution of the program as well as the response from students. We outline key programmatic challenges and opportunities in offering a hybrid doctoral program side by side with an existing face-to-face program. We conclude with two examples of the hybrid doctoral program in action (redesigning coursework and virtual talks) to demonstrate how we confronted these challenges and opportunities in the design of the program.

In this paper we explore the philosophy, pedagogy and implementation of the third year course sequence in the M.A. in Educational Technology program at Michigan State University. We discuss how "little-r" revolutions in teaching and learning, i.e., technology facilitated revolutions specific to individual classrooms and contexts, are used to introduce our students to the thinking patterns of designers and innovators. This is accomplished by an overlapping emphasis on learning by design, trans-disciplinary creative cognitive tools, innovative technology, and reflective practice. In this environment, we also transition our students from acting as consumers of educational media to being producers of educational experiences. That is, not only do the students construct new educational media, they consider the aesthetic and affective implications of technology use for teaching and learning. Finally, given the rapid evolution of educational technologies, we support students as they establish a foundational vision for the interplay of education and technology that will serve them into the future, as they, and their learners, adapt to new and emerging digital environments.

Over 400 educators and youth professionals have completed Life Space Crisis Intervention training offered by the Charlevoix-Emmett Intermediate School District in rural northern Michigan. In this article, participants describe how significant changes in their own perceptions, mindsets, and actions translate into direct benefits for themselves and the young people they serve. When adults are able to understand themselves and their role in helping children in stress, they see the advantage to managing their own emotional state. They stay calm, listen more, and talk less before, during, and after crisis. They drain off a child's intense emotions, encourage a child to tell the story from their own point of view, recognize patterns of behavior, and teach new skills. Most behavior problems can be resolved without negative consequences. But, if school discipline policy calls for a consequence, it is given last, when a student is prepared to accept it. With training, problems become opportunities--for both the child and the helping adult.

Michigan's intermediate school districts were created by constitutional convention in 1962. Between their inception and 2000, few units of government were less visible and less understood. This article chronicles the emergence of one intermediate school district as an aggressive force for change in education and a locus of activity for community organizations seeking to improve public schools. Key to this transformation is the Kent Intermediate School District's implementation of the public relations process--research, planning, implementation, and evaluation--to create a two-way dialogue and a culture of responsiveness with stakeholders.

Research has shown that students' initial attitudes are key to understanding attrition in engineering programs. The College of Engineering at Michigan State University introduced a cornerstone design sequence in fall 2008 that provided an opportunity to study freshman attitudes towards engineering. We tested whether the new design sequence (DS) was more effective than the older traditional sequence (TS) at positively influencing freshman attitudes over the course of one semester. We collected attitude data twice, i.e., in the beginning and towards the end of fall 2008 semester, using the Pittsburgh Freshman Engineering Attitude Survey, and examined changes in attitude in the two groups with repeated analysis of covariance models. In fall 2008, 722 freshmen entered the College of Engineering. The analyses reported here include data from 389 of those students. We found that freshmen join the program with positive or strongly positive attitudes towards engineering. Those strong attitudes are durable and resistant to change. Students in the DS group bad higher A CT scores, enjoyed math and science the most, and did not believe engineering to be an exact science. The DS and TS groups bad similar longitudinal trajectories so there was no evidence for differential influence on student attitudes. Strongly positive initial attitudes coupled with insignificant changes in these attitudes could mean that one semester is insufficient to effect a measureable change. This quantitative study is a subset to the longitudinal study based on explanatory mixed methods design. The qualitative data collected in a follow up study (one-on-one interviews) may shed more light on the numerical results to further investigate the effectiveness of the freshman curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]