Tuesday, June 23
3:30 PM-4:30 PM
CEST
Room 1

Making connections: Equipping the next generation of teachers for educational technology use

Keynote Conversation ID: 57921
  1. aaa
    Jo Tondeur
    Vrije Universiteit Brussel
  2. Sarah Howard
    University of Wollongong

Abstract: Educational practice exists in tension between two functions: education as a matter of assuring continuity of knowledge and society; and; education as a matter of fostering creativity and change. These dual agendas often result in a range of clashes and issues about the purpose of Education, conceptions of learning and the role of the teacher. In contemporary education, these endeavors are supported by digital technologies, which have the capacity to bridge these two functions and even create connections. However, using digital technologies in learning poses an additional set of challenges. These challenges affect teacher training institutions, schools, and teachers. To be able to navigate this educational landscape teachers are expected to effectively integrate technology in teaching and learning processes to teach expected content and support creative thinking. Yet, technology integration and related change in practice continues to be a challenge for many teachers and educational institutions. Many of the questions related to the training for digital technology integration are still unanswered and attempts to address them have generated widespread debates. In an effort to address these issues, teacher training institutions have been considering a range of questions about how to best connect teachers’ competencies and institutional culture in the digital age: Which strategies are effective to train teachers? How can they develop the competencies to adequately use technology in specific subject areas? Can we address the complex systemic nature of digital technology integration at the school level? Although digital technology integration depends in large part on the profile of teachers, innovations should be situated within the wider field of school improvement. An important conclusion is that school characteristics have the potential to promote individual digital technology use. During the keynote speech, Jo Tondeur and Sarah Howard will explore how to successfully develop teachers’ digital competencies, how this relates to individual characteristics, such as pedagogical beliefs, and the connection to educational institutional culture and change. A central theme of the talk will be: how can useful connections be made between research and practice, to inform digital technology use across levels of education and competing agendas, and to equip our next generation of teachers for technology integration? Using a new approach, they will employ artefacts to explore digital competencies in teacher training. Practical strategies to develop connections and digital competencies to support digital technology integration in teaching practice for continuity, creativity and change, will be discussed. Bio: Jo Tondeur is professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Teacher Education Department). Prior to academia he was a teacher across various levels of schooling. His research interests are in the field of educational innovation, technology use, blended learning, professional development and instructional design. Most of his current research focuses on the interplay between (ICT) innovations and pre/in-service training and how this can be associated with teacher and school characteristics. To present how these themes relate, the SQR-model was developed, focusing on strategies to prepare teachers for ICT integration. As a lecturer of Instructional Design he is also committed to finding solutions to real problems by setting up design research. He is for instance investigating how TPACK can be developed in pre- and in-service training e.g. through teacher design teams. Moreover, Jo Tondeur is also exploring how ICT restructures the classroom as a spatial setting and the influences this has on pedagogical choices. For info and papers see https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jo_Tondeur Sarah Howard is an Associate Professor of Digital Technologies in Education, at the University of Wollongong in Australia. She is the Education Lead in the SMART Infrastructure Facility and a full-member of the Early Start Research Institute. Her research looks at technology-related change in education, specifically teacher practice and integration in learning. The driving question of her research is: how can we help teachers best use digital technologies to support what they value in learning? To explore this, she works collaboratively with educators to improve how digital technology use and change are researched, to better understand how complex digital learning and teaching practices occur over time. A key focus of this work is experimenting with new approaches, technologies and multimodal data to observe the classroom and explore digital technology integration, with the aim of conducting research that is meaningful and useful in practice. She collaborates closely with academics across Australia, internationally, and industry partners, such as Google and Intel, to build the critical public-private collaborations needed to support cutting-edge and exploratory research.

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