Teaching Beautiful Questions: Using Literature to Teach Youth Appreciative Inquiry (AI)

Learning to ask the right questions and being empowered to dream is essential to 21st century education. In an effort to create innovative citizens who are able to compete in our increasingly diverse and competitive world, youth can be taught how to discover and build on successful aspects of the past, dream creatively about the future, ask positive questions to design plans, and deliver action. These four components, discovering, dreaming, designing, and delivering, are the mainstays of Appreciative Inquiry (AI), a positive approach to organizational development. In recent years, AI has been increasingly utilized with youth. Teaching AI facilitates the potential to unlock youth’s capacity to identify strengths, build creativity, and ask the right questions to incite action. This positive educational tool stimulates the well-being of youth through an increase in positive emotion, engagement, relationship-building, meaning, and achievement. This author’s capstone suggests that AI principles can be taught to youth in order to improve innovation and well-being. Further, this capstone recommends that literature is one meaningful method to instill and teach AI principles prompting wide scale change. As a result, an AI children’s picture story book is proposed to accomplish this goal

Serious Games in Science Education. A Systematic Literature Review

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Enhancing Free-text Interactions in a Communication Skills Learning Environment

Learning environments frequently use gamification to enhance user interactions.Virtual characters with whom players engage in simulated conversations often employ prescripted dialogues; however, free user inputs enable deeper immersion and higher-order cognition. In our learning environment, experts developed a scripted scenario as a sequence of potential actions, and we explore possibilities for enhancing interactions by enabling users to type free inputs that are matched to the pre-scripted statements using Natural Language Processing techniques. In this paper, we introduce a clustering mechanism that provides recommendations for fine-tuning the pre-scripted answers in order to better match user inputs

Arts Integration Professional Development: the Higher Order Thinking (HOT) Schools approach

The arts have the power to expand cognitive potential through the development of higher order thinking skills, the use of the imagination, forms of self-expression and pathways to self-knowledge. When teachers are educated to integrate the arts in their classrooms, the result is transformation of the learning environment. In this qualitative case study I examined teacher experience in the Higher Order Thinking (HOT) Schools Arts Integration (AI) Professional Development (PD) program. While my research was informed primarily from the perspectives of arts specialist teachers, classroom teachers, and teaching artists, it also includes the voices of other stakeholders in the HOT educational community including administrators, HOT program directors, and parents. I obtained data through questionnaires, interviews, and observations in which I documented teacher experience during various forms of HOT AI PD and their implementation in the classroom. Teachers reported professional growth and described how HOT AI PD had transformed their teaching practice. This was accomplished through experiential and ongoing PD that teachers found inspiring and relevant to their teaching. The various forms of PD included a weeklong residential summer institute with professional teaching artists and various presenters, weekend mini-institutes to reinforce the summer institute content and to share best practices, administrator PD, and various one-day events on different topics. The HOT Schools program is a supportive network providing help and guidance throughout the school year. Emergent themes were related to teacher benefits, student benefits, PD strategies, and how the HOT program builds community. Teachers expressed satisfaction with hands-on PD strategies focused on student-centered learning, with emphasis on process rather than product, encouraging deep learning through the arts. Participants’ narratives highlighted the effectiveness of PD strategies utilizing teachers as instructors for their peers, and collaborative residencies with professional teaching artists in the schools. Teachers enjoyed enhanced collegiality resulting from collaborative work when creating arts-integrated curricula, and arts specialists teachers appreciated the respect they received from classroom teachers who recognized the value of the arts as modes of inquiry. Teachers demonstrated enthusiasm for the program and expressed how they had experienced professional renewal and satisfaction in their teaching as a result of their participation in HOT AI PD

The student-produced electronic portfolio in craft education

The authors studied primary school students’ experiences of using an electronic portfolio in their craft education over four years. A stimulated recall interview was applied to collect user experiences and qualitative content analysis to analyse the collected data. The results indicate that the electronic portfolio was experienced as a multipurpose tool to support learning. It makes the learning process visible and in that way helps focus on and improves the quality of learning. © ISLS.Peer reviewe

Designing personalised, authentic and collaborative learning with mobile devices: Confronting the challenges of remote teaching during a pandemic.

This article offers teachers a digital pedagogical framework, research-inspired and underpinned by socio-cultural theory, to guide the design of personalised, authentic and collaborative learning scenarios for students using mobile devices in remote learning settings during this pandemic. It provides a series of freely available online resources underpinned by our framework, including a mobile learning toolkit, a professional learning app, and robust, validated surveys for evaluating tasks. Finally, it presents a set of evidence-based principles for effective innovative teaching with mobile devices

The Evolution of Pre-Service Teachers TPACK After Completing an Undergraduate Technology Integration Course

The steady momentum of emerging technology tools continues to impact the educational environment, generating dramatic changes over the past five years (Spalding, 2016). According to the 2016 National Educational Technology Plan (NETP), educational institutions that prepare educators often fail to give teachers the technology skills required to do their job well. Many teacher preparation programs claimed technology was integrated throughout the courses within the program; however, the comfort level with technology for pre-service teachers entering the teaching field remained low (Moore-Hayes, 2011; Giles & Kent, 2016; NETP, 2016; Niess & Gillow-Wiles, 2016). As members of the educational learning community, teacher preparation programs must remain focused in supporting pre-service teachers as technology integration has become an integral part of the teaching process. This case study focuses on the experiences of two pre-service teachers as they address teaching requirements during their practicum, working to seamlessly integrate technology into their students’ learning experiences. Both teachers participated in the ITEC 3100 stand-alone course at the beginning of their Junior year. The course extended the learning experience beyond basic skill development to include an overview of various technology frameworks. Using both the Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework (Mishra & Koehler, 2007) and the Levels of Technology Integration (LoTi) Model (Moersch, 2013), the course design focuses on identifying specific tools and strategies that best support pre-service teachers as they develop the necessary skills to integrate technology into the learning environment ultimately enhancing the learning experiences for the students