Section archive - ICT & Teaching

The current study examines the affordances of blogging on establishing communities of practice within an elementary teacher education program. The authors examined pre-service teacher participation in an online community of practice where pre-service teachers, over the course of their elementary education program. An analysis of the data demonstrated tensions around epistemologies, community and identity development.

This article describes an instructional content, which was presented differently in two introductory special education course sections. In a face-to-face (f2f) section, the instructor met with students on regularly scheduled days and times and presented content in person. In the other section, content was presented using enhanced podcasts, consisting of the instructor narrating while PowerPoint slides and other visuals were shown in flash movies that students could download from the Internet at days and times of their choosing. The findings reveal that although data associated with student achievement and student satisfaction were slightly more favorable for the f2f section, the discrepancies may have been related to demographic differences in the student populations of the two sections.

This article proposes that in teachers’ professional development, using the cross-organisational learning and knowledge building model (LKB model) might better connect individual and organisational learning and promote teacher professional development. The authors provide the developed and validated cross-organisational LKB model in the teacher development context with the support of e-portfolio. The authors also discuss the barriers to be overcome when applying the LKB model. Finally, the authors present scenarios developed together with the stakeholders.The findings reveal the following barriers in applying LKB model: teachers’ habits for documenting and externalising their knowledge, participation in cross-organisational communities of educators, and their technical preparedness.

In this qualitative case study the authors explored secondary social studies preservice teachers’ abilities to discern the digitized primary resources available to them for historical thinking instruction. The results revealed that two themes emerged from the initial data analysis: First, the preservice teachers were able to identify and rationalize an importance of digitized primary source websites in teaching the social studies. Second, the pedagogical knowledge preservice teachers held regarding historical thinking was made apparent through their evaluation of the website’s historical thinking task. The authors used the teacher cognition scholarship of Shulman in order to suggest that the preservice teachers’ enumerated knowledge sources are vital in tracing teachers' decisions.