Most campuses provide free email accounts for students, and getting your class signed up is a quick and generally easy process. Sandra Cooper, Assistant Professor at Texas Tech University, may have asked herself the same question. As part of the course, her students are required to submit a weekly Email message with their thoughts for the week. However, as the quarter progressed, Cooper found the students moved more toward a discussion of their own interactions with the students, the lessons they taught, and their own personal teaching philosophies, all subjects much more related to the course content. Listserves are programs that distributes email to a large number of people that are all subscribers to the same list.
Somebody sends an email message to the list address.
The program picks up the message from the list address and sends it to the members of the list. Roddy used a variation of the listserve, an email alias to set up a mailing list that connected students, faculty and graduates. If you think a listserve would be a good addition to your course, you may need to consult with the computer department on your campus for assistance in setting one up. These applications are a little more sophisticated than the simple exchange of Email, but they are still relatively easy to set-up and maintain, require no special hardware, and, according to those who have used them, provide positive interaction for all of the participants. The second painless way to introduce technology into your teacher education classroom is through the use of the Internet, specifically in how to use the resources available on the Internet, and how to use web pages.