“Technology will never replace great teachers, but technology in the hands of great teachers is transformational.”  

– George Couros

EdTech for Teacher Prep (ED4TP) is a technology-integration professional development program meant to assist School of Education faculty and teacher candidates with all things edtech.

Technology for education improves engagement, knowledge retention, encourages individual learning, collaboration, benefits teachers, helps students learn useful life skills through technology not to mention it makes learning more exciting and fun!

During Liz’s year and a half as an Edtech fellow she spent numerous hours providing in time educational technology support for teacher preparation faculty and candidates. Through the services listed below, Liz learned how to support students and faculty with troubleshooting computer issues, assisting  create website platforms on WordPress and Squarespace, and more.

Services Provided

1. Drop-in support: Liz Brennan, Kyle Sweezy, and Kiersten Greene, held office hours for online and in-person support.
2. Workshops: See this link for the spring schedule of weekly, hands-on workshops. 
3. Open Educational Resource: Check out these tabs on this website:
   1. Tools: a list of cool digital pedagogy tools
   2. How-to: step-by-step posts on using a variety of tools (e.g.,        G Suite for Education, Google Classroom, iMovie, Hawksites/WordPress & more)
   3. ET4TP Monthly, the School of Ed edtech newsletter
   4. ET4TP Instagram and Twitter Pages authored by Liz
4. Research

In addition to these services, Liz also spent time assisting Dr. Greene with her academic research projects. Through this opportunity she had the chance to help transcribe interviews, collect, organize, code data, and summarize findings. This work was hard, but it provided Liz with the chance to learn skills of conducting research which she had never had the opportunity to do before. It was an extremely proud moment for her to see her mentor, Dr. Greene, present this research at the CUNY Graduate Center, NYedHub Conference, as well as the ISTE International Society for Technology and Education Conference in 2019.

This was a once in a lifetime opportunity for her to learn the ropes of research, create connections with inspirational Educational Technology leaders in the field, view the world itself through new perspectives, and create life long friendships. Liz is forever grateful for this opportunity.

Over the summer of 2019, Liz also worked on the beginnings of another research project with Dr. Greene. Between the months of May – August, she reviewed the data of 485 school districts in New York State. She collected, and organized this data over the period of the summer. She looks forward to seeing what this data has in store for the new Edtech Team. 😁

I am extremely grateful and humbled by the opportunity to work with such inspirational, caring, and positive faculty at SUNY New Paltz most especially Dr. Greene, and also Paul Rubio. This opportunity has changed my life in numerous ways. This work, not only provided me the experience to witness a research project from start to finish, but I developed a love for learning that I had never experienced before. I will take the theories, and skills that I learned through this fellowship with me wherever I go. Not to mention through whatever challenges I may face to help me grow as an educator. The connections with students, faculty, and EdTech enthusiasts that I gained through this opportunity will be with me for the rest of my life. I truly believe that this work has impacted every aspect of my life and I am excited to teach others what I have learned. I will cherish this time at New Paltz forever, I am truly blessed and immensely proud to be able to be a SUNY New Paltz Edtech Fellow.

Lastly, the endless positivity, understanding, passionate, empathetic, willingness to take chances, willingness to fail, extremely hard work ethic, never give up attitude, and nurturing aspects of Dr. Greene changed my life forever. I will always be thankful to be able to work for her. I feel ready and confident to take on my future career as an educator by being the best version of myself, this version, I have found through the past year and half as a SUNY New Paltz EdTech Fellow.

Student Teaching, here I come!