A standing-room-only crowd gathered at the midtown offices of The Hatchery, a venture collaboration organization, on Tuesday night to hear a panel discuss how schools of education are helping to prepare the 21st-century teacher to recognize and take advantage of the benefits educational technology has to offer. The panel featured Adrienne Garber and Paul Stengel, both educational technologists at the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning (CCNMTL) and project managers on recent work with Teachers College faculty. Dr. Catherine Milne, a researcher at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education & Human Development, was also on the panel.

The event was a Meetup sponsored by NY Ed Tech, a group interested in fostering the use of innovative technologies to improve education. NY Ed Tech hosts bi-monthly panels on different educational technology topics. Membership in the group is free and open to the public through Meetup.com.

Several questions from the moderator and from audience members focused on how schools of education get the research and skills they develop to the wider world of education, particularly opportunities for ed tech firms and entrepreneurs. Garber and Stengel, who are also graduate students at Teachers College, spoke about CCNMTL’s efforts to develop tools that can be used by Columbia faculty as well as those outside the university, including the Inclusive Classrooms Project and open-source multimedia annotation tool Mediathread.

For an overview of the event, see the live blog done by staff members of EdLab, a research, design, and development unit at Teachers College.