Enabling teaching, enabling learning

How does staff development fit the educational technology landscape?

Abstract

The New Technologies: New Pedagogies Project is a nationally funded project to support the use of mobile learning in higher education to support student learning. We explore the staff development process of this larger project, where academics in a Faculty of Education investigate new pedagogies that are required to meet the needs of millennial learners. The staff development process addressed the need for staff to own and use mobile technology in their professional and personal contexts in order to think differently about engaging their students in pedagogically sound ways. We identified four key actions for participants which contributed significantly to the development of the authentic tasks for their pre-service student teachers to undertake as part of their assessment: an understanding of the theoretical frameworks, (authentic learning, action learning, and mobile learning); an understanding of the affordances of the technologies; active participation in authentic tasks which modeled the practice; and active participation in cycles of reflection based on the implications for the development of new pedagogies presented by the three initial understandings.