Social media has become an important part of our lives with the widespread use of the internet. On Facebook, the largest social media platform, people with similar interests can establish a group and communicate with each other. There are Facebook collegial groups created by teachers in many countries. The research aims to identify the…

The increasing digitalisation of communication has not gone unnoticed by the US military. The teaching of communication takes place at the Defense Information School (DINFOS), providing professional instruction to US military members, civilian personnel and allies from around the world. With the emergence of social media and the increasing…

Online professional development (OPD) is gaining increasing popularity. However, online learning environments are not always considered effective venues for supporting authentic learning experiences, and the suitability of OPD for practical learning has not been widely explored. This case study paper presents findings of a pilot implementation of…

This study aims to fill an empirical void in our understanding of how doctoral students, both domestic and international, cope with loneliness and isolation, and what types of tactic they use during different phases of their doctoral studies to overcome such issues. Data gathered through a netnographic study show that loneliness is a major problem…

In recent years, enrollment and overall student performance in rural schools have declined. Research shows that principals are critical to the success of a school system and that implementing a virtual community of practice (CoP) at the principal level has solved some of the issues associated with rurality in some organizations. Such…

Preparing school administrators to promote effective instruction of English language learners (ELLs) is an important dimension of today's educational leadership programs, requiring innovative program activities. This study explores school leadership candidates' use of an observation tool targeted to ELL instruction that incorporated guided video…

New or beginning teachers are well received by the education profession, yet for a large portion of new teachers the assessment of how successful their transition into the first year of teaching tends to be overtly negative. Research reports indicate that the often traumatic and difficult nature of new teachers' experiences is not a new phenomenon…

Transcripts of electronic discussions have traditionally been examined via the use of conversational analysis techniques. Coding such transcripts provides rich data regarding the content and nature of the discussions that take place. However, understanding the content of a message is not limited to the actual message itself. An electronic message…

This study examined teacher's views on the potential use of online in-service education and training (INSET) activities. The study used a qualitative approach. A total of 13 in-service teachers from primary school, vocational school, science and art center, high school in Trabzon (on the Black Sea coast of Turkey) participated in the study. To…

Despite nonnative English-speaking teachers' (NNESTs) professional qualifications and increasing contributions to research in TESOL, the native speaker (NS) myth (Phillipson, 1992) continues to undermine these teachers' sense of professional legitimacy and pedagogical efficacy. Thus, due in great part to the notion of an idealized NS teacher of…

This paper analyses the use of various communication channels in science teachers' professional development project aiming to develop versatile uses for ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) in science teaching. A teacher network was created specifically for this project, and the researchers facilitated three forms of communication…

The purpose of this study was to examine reasons for teacher participation in online communities of K-12 teachers. The authors interviewed 23 teachers from three self-generated online communities and analyzed more than 2,000 postings in those communities. The findings indicated five reasons for participation: (a) sharing emotions, (b) utilizing…

The purpose of this study was to understand how teachers participate in and benefit from an online community of practice (NETwork) for learning to teach. Dependent-samples t-tests were employed to examine the significant differences of members' perceptions of their social experience, while content analysis was utilized to identify members'…

The coming era of Web 2.0 focuses on users' active online participation and interaction. Among such interactive media, the blog is one representative tool of online knowledge construction. The purpose of this study is to explore the behavioral patterns and the depth of knowledge construction when using blogs for teachers' professional development.…

This article described the experiences of an inservice professional development program for teachers with a focus on online synchronous discussions. Transcripts of six online synchronous discussions containing 3600 messages from an online teacher professional development course were analyzed. In addition, the researchers interviewed 10…