Take a Giant Step: A Blueprint for Teaching Young Children in a Digital Age

Calls for enhancing early childhood education and teacher preparation and development by incorporating digital learning and highlights best practices, policy and program trends, and innovative approaches. Outlines goals for 2020 and steps to achieve them

Implementing Personal Devices in Math

This study examined the effect of implementing personal devices into a fifth grade mathematics classroom. Thirty-eight fifth graders participated in this eight-week project with a focus on six students to track their growth. During the study, students engaged in technology based stations that pertained to our geometry unit and coordinate unit. Students took pre and post test on paper to track progress. In addition, students completed online assessments within their practice websites and apps to track comprehension and growth of the content. Furthermore, students were interviewed to ensure they were staying engaged in the online activities and to track student engagement about using personal devices within math

Pedagogies of Possibilities: (Re)designing Teacher Professional Learning to Support the Use of Digital Technologies in Multimodal Pedagogies

Digital technologies have the potential to expand communication opportunities (Walsh, 2011), but challenges exist in including these technologies in early literacy instruction (Flewitt, Messer, & Kucirkova, 2015). The literature explains that teachers identify a need for support in using digital technologies in their teaching (e.g., Hill, 2010) and professional learning activities are herein key. Still, the research offers differing advice about the formats these activities should take and the types of literacy digital technologies can support. This exploratory multiple-case study was designed to create teacher professional learning (TPL) opportunities to support early primary teachers (kindergarten-Grade 2) in creating and enacting multimodal literacy pedagogies that include digital technologies. Participants included 4 teachers and 38 children from their classes. It used ethnographic and narrative methods to document the processes of pedagogical design and implementation. The goals of the study were to produce knowledge about multimodal literacies, multimodal pedagogies, and the ways TPL activities can support each. The study conceptualized TPL activities within an instrumental (McDonald, 2015) Community of Practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991). In each case, 2 teachers collaborated to create literacy lessons that included digital technologies, which the study then documented as they were being taught. The study found that the teachers’ pedagogical practices, children’s literacy practices, and TPL activities were interconnected and expanded. The teachers designed unique pedagogies even when they included the same technological application. There were parallels between the pedagogies or structures that supported teachers’ learning about multimodal literacy and pedagogy in TPL activities and the pedagogies that supported the children’s multimodal literacy learning. The study recommends that the design of learning activities in TPL activities and classrooms recognizes teachers and young children as capable meaning makers and extends from their funds of knowledge. The study recommends that TPL activities support teachers to grow as pedagogical designers, explore the ways they can include digital technologies to support children’s learning, and connect professional learning to classroom practice and programmatic curricula. The study recommends that teachers design multimodal pedagogies to connect to existing classroom practices and include opportunities for children to use digital technologies in tandem with print resources

Democratically engaged assessment: Reimagining the purposes and practices of assessment in community engagement

This document is a project of reclamation and transformation, one that is both ongoing and rooted in years of dialogue within Imagining America and the work of its Assessing Practices of Public Scholarship research group (APPS). It emerges from our own experiences with assessment related to community engagement and from those of many other colleagues on campuses and in diverse communities. It is intended to bring together those who wish to reimagine assessment in light of its civic potential — to develop what we refer to as Democratically Engaged Assessment (DEA).Imagining Americ

Computer Math Games vs. Paper-based Intervention Games: Effects on Addition Fact Fluency for Second Grade Students

The purpose of this action research project is to investigate the ability of computer math games versus paper-based intervention games for improving addition fact fluency. Fact fluency is the ability to answer math facts quickly and accurately. The participants were twenty-one second grade students in a transitional kindergarten through eighth grade private school in a rural setting. Of the twenty-one students, two instructional groups were created through stratified sampling and random selection. One group used computer math games to improve addition fact fluency. The other group played paper-based intervention games to increase their addition fact fluency. The two groups participated ten minutes each day for four weeks in addition to their regular whole group math instruction. The study will use quantitative methods. After the four weeks intervention, the results indicated that students who utilized paper-based games demonstrated the most growth in fact fluency

An Examination of the Relationship Among the Intentions, Features, Affordances, and Outcomes of Saturday Academy for Math Professional Development for Mathematics Teachers

Using a design framework to connect the features of SA4M to the affordances reported, participants of SA4M deepened their content knowledge on both conceptual and skill specific levels, and expressed intentions to incorporate many of the tasks from SA4M into their practices. There are implications for those tasked with creating and evaluating professional development for teachers

An Examination of Special Education Teachers’ Digital Practices

The aim of this study is to understand how mobile devices are being used to support students’ learning (i.e., mobile learning) in specialist schools, and in specialist support units within mainstream schools. A validated survey instrument is used to examine these practices through the lens of a sociocultural digital framework that highlights distinctive mobile learning approaches. One hundred and twenty-six teachers responded to the survey. The findings provide a nuanced understanding of teachers’ current digital pedagogical approaches, and show potential benefits for students, including increased agency. Possible directions for the development of special education teachers’ digital practices are also provided. </jats:p

Navigating the Chasms Between Real and Ideal Literacy Professional Development

In this study, we examine the supportive and hindering factors that influenced 26 teachers’ implementation of pedagogy learned through a research-based, resource-intensive literacy PD initiative (100+ hours). Through post-intervention interviews, we explore the space between learning and enactment of new practices for literacy teaching and learning. Specifically, we ask, What are teachers’ perceptions of the contextual factors that support and hinder their moving from learning to implementation of literacy PD? Results indicate four primary supportive factors (PD facilitators, communities of practice, schools/administrators, and student affective responses) and three primary hindering factors (circumstantial factors, lack of resources, and mismatches between school or district demands). Identifying and considering these factors is an important step toward increasing implementation, which serves as a gatekeeper between teacher learning and student outcomes

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

Research-Informed Teaching in a Global Pandemic: "Opening up" Schools to Research

The teacher-research agenda has become a significant consideration for policy and professional development in a number of countries. Encouraging research-based teacher education programmes remains an important goal, where teachers are able to effectively utilize educational research as part of their work in school settings and to reflect on and enhance their professional development. In the last decade, teacher research has grown in importance across the three i’s of the teacher learning continuum: initial, induction and in-service teacher education. This has been brought into even starker relief with the global spread of COVID-19, and the enforced and emergency, wholesale move to digital education. Now, perhaps more than ever, teachers need the perspective and support of research-led practice, particularly in how to effectively use Internet technologies to mediate and enhance learning, teaching and assessment online, and new blended modalities for education that must be physically distant. The aim of this paper is to present a number of professional development open educational systems which exist or are currently being developed to support teachers internationally, to engage with, use and do research. Exemplification of the opening up of research to schools and teachers is provided in the chapter through reference to the European Union-funded Erasmus + project, BRIST: Building Research Infrastructures for School Teachers. BRIST is developing technology to coordinate and support teacher-research at a European level