Text messaging isn’t usually welcome in the classroom, but a program designed by ASU and UA hopes to turn it into a powerful teaching tool.

The ASU Bob Ramsey Executive Education Program partnered with two UA departments to create Teach Tec, a certificate program designed to train K-12 teachers about how to effectively use new technology in the classroom.

Podcasts, text messages, streaming videos and collaborative software are low-cost and widely available technologies that could be used to engage students who are not typically excited about school, said Gail Barker, co-director of finance for the Arizona Telemedicine Program, which is part of the partnership.

“We can be using technology to get them engaging in projects from a distance,” Barker said.

Once teachers take what they learn back to their schools, they can even work on projects with other classes across the city, she said.

Some ideas developed so far include video conferencing with classrooms at different schools, creating podcasts of lessons and sending quick questions or notes via text message.

But in the program, participating teachers will come up with their own ways to use the technology, Barker said.

“The instructors will come together in groups and actually prepare a lesson,” she said.

They will be able to choose which technology they want to use, present the lesson to the whole group and then be critiqued on how well they used it, she said.

The partnership between the ASU and UA programs, most of which are located in downtown Phoenix, brought together different aspects of education and technology.

ASU’s executive education program and UA’s Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health both specialize in different forms of education, said Linda Hess, executive assistant to the director of ASU’s program.

“[But] the telemedicine program is a totally different type of entity,” she said.

Members of the telemedicine program have experience with finding new uses for existing technologies for the medical field, Hess said, and will be able to help teachers learn to do the same for education.

The curriculum is still under development, but directors plan to start the program in the summer, when K-12 teachers are out of class and able to participate.

The program received funding from the Arizona Regents Reach Out grant, which emphasizes innovative and collaborative distance-learning projects.

Hess said teachers are able to learn different technologies for free that their districts may not have the resources to provide.

But the cuts to education funding across the state have others worried.

Val Angus, coordinator for the Health Science High School in Mesa, said the program would be very beneficial for her school, but it comes at a bad time.

A statement released last week from the ASU College of Public Programs said the Health Science High School was participating in the program, but Angus said this was still up in the air.

Schools usually pay teachers to attend these programs, but Angus said they may not have the money to do so this year.

“With the economy being like it is, a lot of the teachers are not going to be willing to give up that amount of their time for free,” she said.

During the summer months, she said most teachers take other jobs to “support their teaching habits.”

But having the opportunity to learn new technologies would bring a new dynamic to how students learn at Health Science High School.

“We are, by nature, a technical sort of focus school,” she said. “It would be very beneficial if we could learn some ways to bring that technology more alive.”

Reach the reporter at adam.sneed@asu.edu.