The Technology Literacy Challenge envisions a 21^st century where all students are technology literate and have access to the educational resources of the Information Superhighway. The Technology Literacy Challenge Fund (TLCF) supports the Technology Literacy Challenge by providing funds to states and school districts across the nation to invest in educational technology and to integrate it into classroom instruction. Since Congress first funded the program in 1997, nearly $1.5 billion in TLCF funds have supported the implementation of educational technology in all states and more than one-third of all school districts. School districts use TLCF funds for purposes including: applying technology to support school reform, acquiring hardware and software to improve student learning, acquiring connections to telecommunications networks to obtain access to resources and services, and on-going professional development in the integration of technology into curriculum. A major factor in how effectively technology can be used by schools and districts is teacher preparedness to use the technology. Teacher Quality: A Report on the Preparation and Qualifications of Public School Teachers provides a national profile of the current state of teacher preparation and qualifications as well as several indicators of teachers' work environments. The report is based on a survey of a nationally representative sample of full-time public school teachers from the fall of 1998. The survey will be administered again in fall 2000.

Key findings from the Teacher Quality report related to educational technology include:

Twenty percent of teachers reported feeling very well prepared to integrate educational technology into the grade or subject they taught while another 37 percent reported feeling moderately well prepared to do so.

Seventy-eight percent of teachers reported having participated in the last 12 months in professional development focused on integrating educational technology into the grade or subject they taught.
New teachers were slightly less likely to participate in such training (72 percent for teachers with three or fewer years of teaching experience and 79 percent for teachers with four or more years of experience).

Of those teachers who reported participating in professional development focused on integrating educational technology into the grade or subject they taught in the last 12 months, 59 percent reported that it improved their classroom teaching either moderately or a lot.

Among those teachers who reported participating in professional development focused on integrating educational technology into the grade or subject they taught in the last 12 months, 62 percent spent one to eight hours in such professional development and 38 percent spent more than eight hours in such training.

Eighty-one percent of teachers who received more than eight hours of professional development in integrating educational technology reported that it improved their classroom teaching moderately or a lot while 48 percent of those teachers receiving eight or fewer hours of such professional development reported that it improved their classroom teaching moderately or a lot.