(Email: [email protected])
Dr Sue Trinidad has taught pre-service and post-service teachers within the Faculty of Education, Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Western Australia for the past 15 years. This has included duties of training teachers in the areas of technology, using electronic communications to enhance teaching and learning environments, information literacy skills and educational theory, supervision of training teachers on teaching practice, supervision of Masters and Doctoral students. Previously, she was a primary school teacher with the Western Australian Education Department. Sue has been involved in many consultations with local school-based projects and national projects and presents regularly at local, national and international conferences. Her research interests include technology planning and implementation, social constructivist/situated learning environments, particularly through online learning, using computers with young children and safe use of computers.The e-revolution is affecting the way we teach and learn today. Interactive technologies enable educators and students to access and build knowledge from numerous sources and multiple perspectives more easily with the Internet supporting a "social interaction model" of teaching and learning. Technology can be used as the vehicle for communication, collaboration and the framework for mediated learning that takes place between educators, peers and the wider community to produce authentic tasks, projects or investigations. Assessment can be open-ended, seamless, negotiable, educative, explicit, informative and ongoing in a community of learners, as is the feedback to students. To work in such e-learning environments our educators and students need to develop new skills. This paper reports on directions at a national level for Australia, and at a local level in Western Australia, preparing educators and students for learning in an online world. This will be illustrated through local school and university case studies.published_or_final_versionCentre for Information Technology in Education, University of Hong Kon
