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Ten years ago, I attended one professional development session on using e-mail and another on using PowerPoint. These are both tools I learned about in high school and used extensively in college. I was annoyed at these wastes of my time, but I was also shocked at how many of my colleagues did not know the basics.

In the past, teachers needed training in the mechanics of e-mail and PowerPoint, just like today many need training in the basics of social media and tablet use. But these trainings are not necessary for everyone. Most of those entering the teaching force today never knew life without a computer. They grew up with e-mail, Facebook and YouTube. They operate easily on PCs, Macs, tablets and phones, and they adapt quickly to technological changes.

Young teachers instinctively incorporate ICT (information and communications technology, for those not familiar with the lingo) into their work to the extent that they are often hindered by school, district and/or state policies around it. But their ability to use new technologies is useless if they don’t know how to teach. As Boomers retire and Millenials enter the classroom, we need to stop considering efforts to build ICT capacity as separate from efforts to build overall educator capacity.

The best place to start in that endeavor is pre-service. Ensuring that aspiring educators get experience in front of a class with the support of a master educator is key. While prospective teachers might know how to Tweet or blog, they don’t know how to assess student learning or teach higher order thinking skills. Working with an experienced educator on assessing learning can spark their thinking about how to do so using Twitter. Seeing a master teacher help students develop higher order thinking skills can inspire them to use blogging to reach the same end.

Tools change, but the need for educators to be prepared when they enter the classroom does not. And several new initiatives are working to ensure that educators are ready to teach from day one. For example, the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education and Stanford University have developed edTPA, a multiple-measure assessment system that ensures that prospective educators demonstrate the ability to help all students succeed before becoming teachers of record. This assessment system requires teaching candidates to produce authentic teaching artifacts (such as lesson plans, video clips of instruction, analyses of student learning and more) as well as reflective commentaries justifying these artifacts. And it requires prospective teachers spend significant pre-service time in real classrooms working with students under the supervision of experienced educators.

Such efforts do not directly address the ICT capacity of new teachers. But by strengthening their overall knowledge base, they help new teachers use the tools they are already comfortable with in the best way possible.

This post originally appeared on the Microsoft Partners in Learning Hot Topics blog.

Image by Janto Dreijer (Own work (I took this photo)) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons