Mobile technologies as a catalyst for pedagogic innovation within teacher education

This article reviews the use of mobile technologies within teacher education at the University of Northampton. In order to develop a strong commitment to digital literacy, the School of Education is using sets of teaching iPads with trainee teachers and has allocated an iPad to every member of the academic staff. Experiences from mobile technology projects involving ITT students, primary teachers and academics are shared to illustrate how mobile technologies have been a catalyst for new pedagogies based on a social constructivist model of learning in the teacher education programmes. The author aims to develop creative, self-directed learners who can work in collaborative teams within a professional community of teachers, academics and students. The author has considered ways in which mobile devices extend learning beyond taught sessions, and how the use of apps to make shareable digital artefacts can lead to purposeful engagement. To this end, the School of Education is focusing on a set of core apps that facilitate the creation, collaboration, curation, and capture of content

Novice programming environments: lowering the barriers, supporting the progression

In 2011, the author published an article that looked at the state of the art in novice programming environments. At the time, there had been an increase in the number of programming environments that were freely available for use by novice programmers, particularly children and young people. What was interesting was that they offered a relatively sophisticated set of development and support features within motivating and engaging environments, where programming could be seen as a means to a creative end, rather than an end in itself. Furthermore, these environments incorporated support for the social and collaborative aspects of learning. The article considered five environments—Scratch, Alice, Looking Glass, Greenfoot, and Flip— examining their characteristics and investigating the opportunities they might offer to educators and learners alike. It also considered the broader implications of such environments for both teaching and research. In this chapter, the author revisits the same five environments, looking at how they have changed in the intervening years. She considers their evolution in relation to changes in the field more broadly (e.g., an increased focus on “programming for all”) and reflects on the implications for teaching, as well as research and further development

Communities of Practice Along the Texas-Mexico Border: A University and School District Leadership Partnership

This chapter focuses on how one university leadership preparation program along the Texas-Mexico border made a deliberate and concerted effort to build a principal pipeline by establishing a local university school partnership with several local school districts along a border that is bilingual, bicultural, and binational. The preparation program focused on realigning to national standards, actively sought out collaborative feedback from district partners on the development of course assessments, the co-design of clinical experiences, establishing accessible in-district program scheduling, course instruction provided by highly qualified faculty, developing and implementing multiple program and course assessments, and established and implemented dispositions