Three More SITE Presentations: Pre-Service Teachers, Wikis, and Social Networking

Reflective Digital Media in Teacher Education
Timo Portimojarvi, University of Tampere, Finland

Developing curriculum of teacher education
- Cultural view of curriculum and profession
  - Historical, cultural, and political objectives
  - Teachers are social and cultural actors
  - The development of the curriculum is a practice-based research process
- Three-level curriculum model
  - Personal level – autobiographical and individual process of developing a personal and professional identity
    - Experiential life world
      - Streams of situations, feelings, actions and ideas
      - In Te, experiences in teaching practices, studies, and personal life
    - Rich multimodal documentation
      - Record of situations, experiences, and moods collected easily and quickly without critical selection
      - Basis for reflection on action (or already reflection in action)
    - Personal mobile devices
      - cellular phones for imaging, recording, and making notes (“lifeblog”)
      - Blog-based digital portfolio
  - Group level – social processes of becoming a member of the profession
    - Conceptual and practical life world
      - Practices, requirements, and cultures of the community
    - Combining and considering information
      - Dialog with peers and proportioning individual and shared new conceptions with formal requirements and personal prior knowledge
    - Shared virtual spaces
      - Group blogs and an aggregated entity of the personal blog
      - Wiki-based collaborative document creation
  - Public level – skills and attitiudes in participating in public discourses
    - Discourse of teacher profession
      - Developing curriculum and the working culture of the school
      - Connection to larger networks of colleagues, parents, and other partners
    - Producing, reproducing, and publishing formal information
      - Outlines, plans, and statements for the future
      - Reflection for action, done for preparation of future moments in various contexts, based on re-interpretation of earlier reflections
    - Public forums of participation
      - Open forums, blogs, wikis, and other environments
      - Skills for participating and the use of tools learned in teacher education
Reflective learning in teacher profession and education
- Teacher as reflective practitioner
  - inquiry-based approach to his or her own work
  - critical reflection as a tool for ongoing personal and professional development (revising curriculum, improving their work environmenent, professionalizing teaching, developing policy)
- Teacher education (reflective action in 3×3 levels)
  - Refection on, in, and for action
  - Reflection about content, process, and permises
Enhancing documentation and reflections with digital media
- Student journals or portfolios
  - Often used in higher education context
  - Can promote reflection in many ways through varying strategies and devices
- Digital media supporting learning and reflection — new tools for:
  - Recognition and awareness
  - Documentation
  - Sharing
  - Discussion and dialog
  - Presenting
Framework for reflective media in teacher education
- Aspects of the study
  - Type of media
  - Forms of activity
  - Focus of reflection
  - Digital media skills
  - Relation with information
- Levels of study
  - Individual
  - Group
  - Public
Results of implementing this framework will be shared in the future

Technology-rich Teacher Education: Faculty Concerns During Involvement in a Technology-Rich Cohort of Teacher Candidates
Loretta Donovan and Tim Green, Cal State-Fullerton, USA

Can We Model Wiki Use in Technology Courses to Help Teachers Use Wikis in Their Classrooms
Swapna Kumar, Boston University

Project Steps
- Began by looking at wikis — invited them to find three wikis used in education
- Looked at good and bad wiki designs using Wikispaces or PBWiki
- Dicussion on the challenges, questions, usefulness
  - Activities that the wiki is useful for
    - Reconsidered projects that they had students do in collaboration previously
      - Brainstorming
  - Instructions for using it
  - Grading of wiki work
  - Boundaries for students
- Individual use of wikis
  - Teachers developed an activity for an element of their curriculum
    - Teachers say that students are writing better: more explicit in detail and more careful in language
Follow-Up Study
- Gather data from how teachers used wikis in thier classrooms and student reactions

The Mash-Up of Web 2.0 Technologies: The Future of Podcasting and Social Networking
Brad Reamsbottom and Calvin Toth, University of Lethbridge, Canada

Podcasting: Subscription-based audio and video available for students
Where are students accessing podcasts?
- News
- Entertainment
  - Current TV
- Education
  - iTunesU
- Social Networks
  - Digg
Students prefer social networks
- We went there, and they don’t want us there
Why did we forget about other places besides social networks
- It takes more time to create a blog, podcast, vidcast
- It needs to be entertaining (not just a lecture on YouTube)
- News has to entertain and make minds inquire
- iTunes U requires lots of setup
Podcast Problem Solving
- Create synamic content — students don’t want to hear more lecture
- Make it available using the tools that they use
  - Viddler
    - Video-based website that allows dynamic commenting and blog integration
    - Acts as an informant and supporting resource
  - JumpCut
    - Online video editing tool; import video, photos, and audio and edit them into a creative and fun presentation
  - TokBox
    - Web-based video conferencing
    - Send video email and make video calls
    - Video emails can be embedded on blogs
    - Blogs can hold extra resources to support the podcast
  - YouTube
- Let your students make it viral
  - If it is attractive to them, they will repurpose it and repost it in their blogs
Remember the Rules
- Keep it fun and creative
- Don’t lecture
- Don’t limit yourself
- Share it, don’t force it
- Create inquiring minds
- Imagery and sound
- Tag it

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