Esther Berkowitz St. Joseph's College, New York

Esther Berkowitz is an associate professor in the Child Study Department and Director of the Master of Arts in Literacy and Cognition, Brooklyn Campus of St. Joseph’s College. Berkowitz taught elementary through middle school for more than 30 years before moving to the college level at St. Joseph’s College. Berkowitz earned her doctorate in Language, Literacy, and Learning from Fordham University. Her dissertation was given Fordham’s Alumni Achievement Award for Outstanding Dissertation. She currently teaches literacy methods courses and supervises action research projects of pre-service teachers. On the graduate level, she teaches graduate courses in diagnosis and recommendations for reading problems and supervises the graduate in-service teachers in the literacy practicum.
Berkowitz’s interest in technology began with the TRS-80 computer when there were no programs and the computer had to be programmed by the user. Later, as an intermediate grade language arts teacher, she was one of the few teachers in her school to be presented with four classroom computers with the stipulation that computer use be integrated into the language arts. As a college teacher, she revised her literacy courses to integrate technology. Berkowitz has presented at conferences on integrating technology into the classroom.