The recent Covid-19 pandemic has dramatically disrupted schooling around the world. Social distancing requirements have resulted in many countries closing physical school buildings or remaining open but delivering a hybrid model of off-site and on-site teaching and learning. This poses a variety of challenges for Initial Teacher Education (ITE)…

It is widely recognised that the development of higher order thinking skills is a fundamental goal of higher education. There are a variety of online tools that assist the development of student higher order thinking. In this paper, a process of scaffolding for the writing of higher-order questions enabled through peer learning activities is…

Virtual reality (VR) platforms act as a potentially transformative tool in learning and teaching. The aim of this study was to examine pre-service teachers' (PST) perceptions about VR, inclusive of their beliefs about its capacity to be used as a teaching and learning tool. A case-study, conducted at an urban university in Australia involved a…

Utilising appropriate Information Communication Technologies (ICT) as instructional tools in teacher education can be a challenging yet worthwhile endeavour. This paper reports the difficulties and benefits of a recent inter-university project requiring preservice primary teachers to construct professional digital portfolios using the support of…

This working paper aims to give an overview of the national policies that exist in the field of information and communication technology (ICT) and initial teacher education. Information on this topic was initially gathered via a survey, in the form of a country questionnaire, which was conducted as part of the analytical strand of the the…

The paper reports the findings from a project which examined the interface between Peer Assisted Learning (PAL) and eLearning in a higher education setting. Traditional uses of ICTs in Higher Education have focused on the "transfer model" where existing face to face pedagogies have tended to be transferred to approaches to eLearning.…

This study was undertaken in response to the imperative of teacher education courses incorporating National Professional Standards for Teachers, in particular Standard 7, which deals with the professional engagement of teachers (AITSL, 2011). It aimed to evaluate the efficacy of simulation and active recall as a learner-centred pedagogy in…

This paper reports the impact of a collaborative professional experience model on pre-service secondary mathematics teachers' perspectives and practices within a learning community. Nine pre-service teachers made 12 school visits over one year to observe and co-teach problem-solving lessons in two Year 8 classes. They discussed the lesson with the…

This case study examined the integration of a media annotation tool ("MAT") into the learning and assessment activities of an undergraduate teaching (physical education) course. The media form or artefact for annotation was video recordings demonstrating individual learners' teaching practice. The learners categorised (marked sections)…

Pam Wright highlights the role of technology in providing situated learning opportunities for preservice teachers to explore the role commercial computer games may have in primary education. In a study designed to assess the effectiveness of an online unit on gaming incorporated into a course on learning technologies, Wright found that thoughtful…

The purpose of this study was to field-test several conferencing technologies in regional schools in Victoria to determine whether the technologies are appropriate for the needs of the university supervisor, trainee teachers and supervising teachers with regard to practicum placements. The study also explored the potential of technology for other…

For almost three decades, the landscape of teacher education has been modestly shaped by the exploration of practices that made use of what were, at the time, current instances of computing and communication technologies (CCTs). More broadly and importantly however, the deployment of CCTs globally has, over the same time period (1980-2008),…

This paper describes an innovative pilot project at the University of Canberra aimed at providing pre-service early childhood teachers with the skills, confidence and ideological change required to include technology-enhanced learning as part of the early childhood curriculum. The impact of the project was evaluated through participant…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to critically examine an assessment task, undertaken by pre-service science teachers, that integrates the use of technology (in this case digital video-recorders and video-editing software) whilst scaffolding skill development. The embedding of technology into the assessment task is purposeful, aiming to…

Reports on the use of a HyperCard-based tool by preservice teachers to create and modify concept maps about science- related subject matter. Data gathered from interviews, journals, and concept maps indicate that the concept-mapping tool was easy to use and allowed teachers to organize their cognitive frameworks into more powerful integrated…