As educational standards continue to transform, it has become essential for educators and pre-service teachers to receive the support and training necessary to effectively instruct their students and meet societal expectations. However, there is not a clear consensus on what constitutes teacher effectiveness and quality within the education realm. The Handbook of Research on Professional Development for Quality Teaching and Learning provides theoretical perspectives and empirical research on educator preparation and methods for enhancing the teaching process. Focusing on teacher effectiveness and support provided to current and pre-service educators, this publication is a comprehensive reference source for practitioners, researchers, policy makers, graduate students, and university faculty.
This book addresses the issues confronting educators in the integration of digital technologies into their teaching and their students’ learning. Such issues include a skepticism of the added value of technology to educational learning outcomes, the perception of the requirement to keep up with the fast pace of technological innovation, a lack of knowledge of affordable educational digital tools and a lack of understanding of pedagogical strategies to embrace digital technologies in their teaching. This book presents theoretical perspectives of learning and teaching today’s digital students with technology and propose a pragmatic and sustainable framework for teachers’ professional learning to embed digital technologies into their repertoire of teaching strategies in a systematic, coherent and comfortable manner so that technology integration becomes an almost effortless pedagogy in their day-to-day teaching. The materials in this book are comprised of original and innovative contributions, including empirical data, to existing scholarship in this field. Examples of pedagogical possibilities that are both new and currently practised across a range of teaching contexts are featured.
As the areas of community education and professional development continue to expand, the technologies that are utilized in these programs are also progressively advancing. However, it can sometimes be difficult to pin-point the best system in such a vast, ever-changing world of technology. Technology Use and Research Approaches for Community Education and Professional Development investigates how the role of information technology is impacting the academic and workplace environments. This publication will explore areas such as unique learning styles, various methods of disseminating information, and technology's role and impact within these settings. Researchers, practitioners, and instructors in the areas of adult, continued, and higher education will benefit from this text's innovative way of addressing efficient methods of utilizing technology.
Technology-Enhanced Professional Learning addresses the need for continuous workplace learning that derives from the emergence of new, specialized, and constantly changing work practices. While continuous learning is fundamental to enabling individuals to function in and productively shape contemporary workplaces, digital technology is increasingly central to productive workplace practice. By examining the intersection of human learning processes, emergent work practices, and patterns of use of digital technology to support learning and work, this edited collection brings the disparate fields of professional learning and technology-enhanced learning together to advance theory and practice in both realms.
This book investigates the use of network technologies in research, and explores how such use potentially changes the nature of professional learning between academics. It attempts to situate the discussion of technology use in real-world research settings, to identify the different forms of participation in intellectual exchange embedded in academic dialogue, and to further contribute to knowledge on how the use of network technology potentially changes the nature of learning. Multiple data collection methods are employed, in two forms of study: a single case study, and a number of individual interviews. The single case study was carried out over a one-year period, and consisted of interviews (22 interviewees), observations, and document review. Individual semi-structured interviews were carried out over a similar period of time with a wider and different population of 24 academics from different Oxford faculties. Half of these were interviewed twice.The main findings presented in this book demonstrate that the direct consequences of technology use are changes to academic dialogue and scholarly communication in general. The change to this critical aspect of research – scholarly communication – has potentially led to more distributed research in interconnected research environments. It is the changes to scholarly communication and the research environment that consequently affect participation in intellectual exchange.
Successfully leverage technology to enhance classroom practices with this practical resource. The authors demonstrate the importance of educational technology, which is quickly becoming an essential component in effective teaching. Included are over 100 organized classroom strategies, vignettes that show each section’s strategies in action, and a glossary of classroom-relevant technology terms. Key research is summarized and translated into classroom recommendations.
Action Research Communities presents a new perspective on two current and proven educational practices: classroom-/school-based action research and professional learning communities. Implementation of one or the other of these practices often results in a variety of possible benefits for the teaching–learning process, for student achievement, and for overall school improvement. While these might seem to be separate, isolated practices, the author has taken the beneficial aspects of each practice and merged them into a cohesive and potentially powerful concept, coined "action research communities." Each of the two concepts or approaches (action research and professional learning communities) is presented and discussed in detail. Because they both focus on local-level improvement of educational practice and share several overlapping features, the two concepts are then merged into a single entity—action research communities, or ARCs. These professional learning communities, with action research at their core, hold an immense amount of power and potential when it comes to enhanced professional growth and development for educators, increased student achievement, school improvement, and educator empowerment. ARCs essentially capitalize on all the individualized benefits and strengths of action research and of professional learning communities, and merge them into a single educational concept and practice. ARCs have the potential to help educators everywhere experience: •a common and collective focus and vision; • sustained collaborative inquiry; •individualized, customizable—and meaningful—professional growth; and •true empowerment that comes with this form of collaborative, inquiry-based, and reflective practice. Practical guidance for the development and implementation of ARCs is also provided, by focusing on ways in which professional educators (teachers, administrators, support staff, etc.) can implement, sustain, and extend the impact of their respective action research communities. Specific roles for district administrators, building administrators, and teachers are presented and discussed in depth, as are ways that ARCs can be used both to deepen professional learning for educators and to improve student learning.
Traditional classrooms are fast becoming a minority in the education field. As technologies continue to develop as a pervasive aspect of modern society, educators must be trained to meet the demands and opportunities afforded by this technology-rich landscape. The Handbook of Research on Teacher Education in the Digital Age focuses on the needs of teachers as they redesign their curricula and lessons to incorporate new technological tools. Including theoretical frameworks, empirical research, and best practices, this book serves as a guide for researchers, educators, and faculty and professional developers of distance learning tools.
