Recently the University of Wyoming foundation announced they would be accepting proposals from the colleges of the University of Wyoming to be awarded the Heywood Grant. The grant has been awarded 6 times in the past and this year’s winner was the College of Education. The college requested $107,190 from the grant.
“We wrote it cause the College of Education wanted to provide kits of equipment like laptops and cameras to student teachers,” Associate Professor, Dr. Alan Buss, said.
Using a service called Panopto, a video steaming service, will allow the student teachers to broadcast their work in the classroom. This will make it much easier for college instructors and professors to supervise their student-teachers long distance.
Using the grant money, the College of Education will be able to purchase multiple cameras for their student teachers.
“The plan was to have enough equipment to have many perspectives of the classroom,” Buss said.
Having multiple cameras will allow the supervising professor to watch the student teacher teach, and monitor the students as they receive instruction.
The College of Education’s primary focus with the grant money will be to bridge the physical gap between the university and the schools that the student teachers will teach at.
“What I see it doing is allowing better access to the Wyoming classrooms. The idea is we would also be collecting video on classrooms, allowing our students to view a video and learn from it,” Professor and Associate Dean for Undergraduate Programs, Dr. Leslie Rush, said.
The video recorded from the classrooms can be used as an education tool to show students a certain situation, how they should handle that situation, certain teaching styles and how a teacher would introduce different types of lessons.
Buss and Rush both worked on proposals within the College of Education then combined their ideas to formulate their final proposal for the grant.
This is the first time the College of Education has received the Heywood Grant. Some of the past grantees are the College of Agriculture; received $85,000 in 2005 and the College of Engineering; received $78,648 in 2007.
“I think what they put together has a lot of appeal to it. They’re going to be educating future educators,” Senior Vice President for Development, John Stark, said.
Using this money to help our future educators have better tools at their disposal when student teaching can greatly improve the overall classroom experience.
Being able to livestream a student teacher’s classroom can help streamline the communication between student teachers and their professors.
