Online and blended learning (OBL) brings unique advantages to K-12 teachers and students. Thus, it is essential to prepare preservice teachers (PSTs) for designing effective K-12 OBL lessons in educator preparation programs (EPPs) so they can utilize OBL's distinctive characteristics to benefit their students immediately when they have their own…

At the very beginning of social distancing in Australia, just before school closures in early March 2020, two academics in the field of educational technologies sought a way to quickly support teachers during the sudden shift to online education. This article provides an overview of the rapid rollout of a series of videos developed to build…

As both educational technology and Communities of Practice (CoPs) have become more established in schools globally, it is unsurprising that they have been employed together to improve teachers' practice. The creation of collaborative professional learning groups to support the use of educational technology in the classroom has been explored in…

Beginning in February and March of 2020, school closures impacted at least 90% of the world's population of students, according to UNESCO estimates. As educators swiftly shifted to teaching online, they sought information to guide their initial planning and teaching in new environments with new tools. Analysis of educators' search terms and their…

Mathematics teachers are increasingly encouraged to incorporate computer-based technology in their classrooms, but these tools require strategic use in order to provide any substantive improvement to student understanding. This paper reports on how three middle-school mathematics teachers leveraged one particular tool, PhET interactive simulations…

In the COVID-19 shift to online education, many educators have sought out video conference technologies (such as Zoom) aiming to replicate traditional classrooms online. At face value, synchronous video appears to offer more immediate replicability of existing f2f synchronous teaching than asynchronous modalities. However, moving pedagogy from one…

To address the emotional and mental health needs of teachers during the COVID-19 pandemic, existing instructional technology tools can be rapidly adapted to support trauma-informed educational practices. In this action research and practice brief, the instructional strategies and communication tools used to support the mental health needs of…

As of mid-April 2020, 1.5 billion learners were affected by school closures across 191 countries due to the COVID-19 pandemic (UNESCO, 2020). During the weeks of school closures, teachers were expected to become online teachers overnight. As teacher educators, we were curious about teachers' readiness for online practice. In the Teachers'…

Explaining is one of the fundamental teaching practices. Yet, much is still unknown about the ways in which pre-service secondary teachers (PSTs) learn to create instructional explanations. Even less is known about how technology can support PSTs in this process. This paper describes an instructional module which used video to enhance PSTs'…

Broadly speaking, the maker movement is characterized by people who engage in the construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction of physical artifacts, and who share both the process of making and their physical products with the broader community of makers. There is growing sentiment that elements of the maker movement have the capability of…

While teachers in many states are implementing the Common Core State Standards, increased attention is being paid to supporting teachers through professional development, especially for meeting standards involving digital literacy. This study explores the influence of targeted professional development, the Support, Time, Access, and Knowledge…

The way preservice teachers learn to use technology within their practice varies widely depending on the learning opportunities available (e.g., technology-infused teacher preparation program vs. standalone education technology course), and the knowledge, skills, and attitudes of the teacher educators within their teacher preparation programs.…

While social media use has become nearly ubiquitous, there have been few efforts to study how teacher educators prepare their students to responsibly use and teach about social media. This study analyzes 71 students' survey data, reflections, and class activities from education courses across three universities to better understand the successes…

This paper explores the use of animations as an approximation of practice to provide a transformational technology experience for elementary mathematics preservice teachers. Preservice teachers in mathematics methods courses at six universities (n = 126) engaged in a practice of decomposing and approximating components of a fraction lesson. Data…

Computational thinking (CT) is a process and skill set that is being expected of our students after their K-12 education. The issue is that most teachers do not know how to build CT expertise within their students. To address this challenge, we discuss two separate course designs within an initial teacher licensure course on educational…