Abstract:
Field experience at the Hong Kong Institute of Education (HKIEd) is viewed as a central aspect to our programmes. One of the major reasons is that it encourages student teachers to innovate and reflect on their practice within a supportive environment as part of their professional development process. Reflection provides an avenue for students to recall and retell the types of intellectual and affective activities that they engaged in and how to lead to a new understand and appreciations (Boud et al., 1985:19). Besides, it also facilitates the creation of a learning community in which student teachers, supporting teachers and Institute supervisors can learn together and so mutually enhance their professional development.
On the other hand, mobile technology and cloud services help to facilitate the creation of this kind of learning community in which student teachers can get support from their Institute supervisor and peers at anytime, anywhere and any place. Cloud services offers many possibilities to educators for its use, whether for communicating with students through social networking services like Facebook, sending out updates via Twitter, providing online tutoring, or having students collaborate on their writing using a wiki. As the cost of tablet PCs (e.g. Apple iPad2) becomes affordable for local educators, Institute supervisors can make use of this type of mobile device to access cloud-based storage and services during the school visits. Furthermore, professional dialogues will be flexibly in varied digital forms and no longer restricted to verbal comments during pre/post-lesson conferences and written feedback on the Field Experience (FE) supervision forms. Besides the cloud-based communication channels, the FE supervision forms can be annotated with rich media and also links to Internet resources.
This project aims to adopt mobile technology and cloud services to create a convenient and efficient environment to enhance student teachers’ professional development in Field Experience. The digital forms of FE documents such as Teaching Practice (TP) supervision forms, FE portfolios, and reflective journals are also convenient for student teachers and Institute supervisors to build their own e-portfolio. Colleagues from five departments across three faculties, the School Partnership and Field Experience Office (SPFEO) and Centre for Learning. Teaching and Technology (LTTC) will be involved in this project.
Code:
T0105
Principal Project Supervisors:
Subjects:
Start Date:
01 Feb 2012
End Date:
15 Dec 2013
Status:
Completed
Result:
It was observed that student teachers were willing to try the new technologies in teaching and learning. They uploaded their work (e.g. teaching materials, lesson plan, etc.) on the cloud services (e.g. Dropbox) and shared the work with their supervisors.
The supervisors were able to read their materials and made comments through the cloud services. Student teachers responded to the comments and made necessary modifications to their lesson plans. As the cloud services provided a convenient environment for resources sharing among student teachers and their supervisors, both student teachers and the supervisors were able to upload and download the materials easily.
Project team members were enriched with experience of applying new technologies in teaching and learning. Through seminars at different levels, other Institute staff are also aware that mobile technology and cloud services can be used to enhance teaching and learning.
The digital form of FE documents such as TP supervision forms were convenient for both student teachers and supervisors to build their own e-portfolio. Some artifacts in electronic form were made by student teachers. These include teaching materials, lesson plans, sample of school students’ work etc.
Some student teachers used Mahara to build their own e-Portfolio for further sharing of their professional practices within and outside the Institute through the use of digital forms of FE documents such as TP supervision forms, FE portfolios, and reflective journals.
Impact:
The impact of the project are:
Enhancing student teacher’s professional development in FE by adopting mobile technology and cloud services to create a convenient and efficient environment for both student and teachers and Institute supervisors during block practice period.
Developing the competency of Institute supervisors in using mobile technology and cloud services in teaching and learning.
Enabling student teachers and Institute supervisors to build their own e-portfolio for further sharing of their professional practices within and outside the Institute through the use of digital forms of FE documents such as TP supervision forms, FE portfolios and reflective journals.
Deliverables:
Dr. Lai Yiu Chi and Dr. Wong Tak Wah (2013, June). The project design and findings were presented at the Redesigning Pedagogy International Conference 2013 in Singapore. The conference is titled as “Supporting field experience in teacher education course by using cloud services and mobile technology”.
吳美華、黎耀志(2013,6)：在學校體驗視導中運用雲端應用與移動科技，論文發表於《數學的探究學習與綠色及雲端運算環境的電子學習》研討會，香港。https://repository.eduhk.hk/en/publications/e1d4d2f1-4603-46a8-afda-11f7...
Dr. Lai Yiu Chi, Dr. Barry Lee, Dr. Wong Tak Wah, Mr. Ng Wing Shui & Mr. Raymond Yuen (2013, June). Sharing seminar at Institute level “Communities of Practice for Teaching Supervision – Enhancing student teachers’ professional development in Field Experience by using cloud services and mobile technology” at The Hong Kong Institute of Education, Hong Kong on 27 Jun 2014. (No. of participants: 20) (Communities of Practice for Teaching Supervision)
Dr. Lai Yiu Chi and Dr. Wong Tak Wah (2013, October). Sharing seminar at Departmental level: “Supporting field experience in teacher education course by using cloud services and mobile technology” , MIT Departmental Seminar, The Hong Kong Institute of Education, Hong Kong on 31 October 2013 (No. of participants: 13) https://repository.eduhk.hk/en/publications/dfdd1da2-6ebb-46db-b43d-9b3f...
Dr. Lai Yiu Chi and Dr. Wong Tak Wah (2013, November). A paper titled “Using social media and cloud services to facilitate teaching and learning in teacher education courses” was presented at the Sixth International Conference on e-Learning and Innovative Pedagogies, Madrid, Spain. https://repository.eduhk.hk/en/publications/68ff8ac7-73d5-4b8b-9289-8253...
Financial Year:
2011-12
Type:
TDG