Teacher Education and Online Learning

Bridging Gaps - and now, the published article

2009-05-03T14:41:00.004+03:00

Over the past two week we've devoted a couple of posts to the webinar
How can the internet be used to bridge gaps between populations?
We've linked to a YouTube video about the course, and we've also posted a review of the webinar itself. And now, with the publication of the latest issue (Vol 10, No. 2) of

The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning

a special edition devoted to education in the Middle East, we can also link to an article by the presenters at the webinar, Elaine Hoter, Miri Shonfeld and Aasma Ganayim. Their article is titled:

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the Service of Multiculturalism

It presents the online inter-group contact hypothesis (OICH) model that served as the basis for their online course, describes the aims of the Center for Multiculturalism and Technology, and evaluates the course itself. Extensive references are also included, making this an important contribution to an examination of ICT and Multiculturalism.

We might add that this issue of the journal contains numerous articles that should be of interest to readers of this blog.

Bridging Gaps - A Review of the Online Session

2009-04-27T14:19:00.004+03:00

The Bridging Gaps online session offered numerous insights for anyone concerned with using the internet to further multi-cultural understanding.

Most of the session was conducted by Elaine Hoter who gave an overview of the courses conducted by the Center for Technology and Multi-Culturalism. Dr. Hoter offered three different definitions of peace:

Negative Peace - the absense of violence

Positive Peace - cooperation, harmony, commerce, mutuality
Structural Peace - equality, independence, sovereignty

She showed us that the Arab and Jewish populations of Israel each adhere to different definitions, hold different narratives about what peace entails:

Hoter emphasized that student teachers in Israel hardly ever meet their counterparts from other populations, and that the purpose of the multi-cultural course the Center runs isn't to solve problems, but is instead considerably more modest - to facilitate meetings that take place on an equal basis.

Hoter, Ganayem and Shonfeld have developed a model for interaction based on the Contact Hypothesis. Their model makes use of the internet as a buffer that permits people to establish contact before they actually meet face to face:

The presenters emphasized that even in this somewhat sheltered situation it was preferable to avoid some topics that might on first glance seem innocuous but carried numerous political overtones. They also stressed, however, that the students in the course noted that the interaction between the teachers in the course served as a model of harmony for the students themselves.

Overcoming stereotypes is, of course, never easy, but the Bridging Gaps session (a recording is available here) showed that the internet, and a great deal of goodwill, can go a long way toward doing so.

Bridging Gaps with Technology

2009-04-20T11:04:00.008+03:00

In a couple of days (Wednesday, April 22, at 20:00 to be exact) we'll be holding a webinar devoted to the question:

How can the internet be used to bridge gaps between populations?

Israel is a society where question of multi-culturalism are critical, but that's no doubt true of many other countries, so we're hopeful that others will be able to learn from our experience - and to contribute from their own.

In that webinar the three leaders of the Center for Technology and Multi-Culturalism, Dr. Miri Shonfeld, Dr. Elain Hotter and Aasma Ganayim will discuss (in English) their experience with courses and seminars that the center facilitates.

From the Center's web site:

Teacher education colleges train the future teacher population for technology-based environments, for change and for a pluralistic society emphasizing the cultural uniqueness of each community. Inter-cultural dialogue is essential for knowledge and mutual respect as well as for a better enlightened human future.

For a glimpse into the work of the Center, we'll offer here a short video:

More on "Who, When and How?"

2009-04-05T15:55:00.006+03:00

A week ago we wrote here about the webinar devoted to Preparing future teachers for internet-aided learning. Since then a number of materials have been edited and we can now make them available for further study.

The Interwise recording of the session is accessible for anyone wishing to listen. It's an hour and a half long, in Hebrew. (In order to listen, it's necessary to install Interwise.)

The PowerPoint presentation that accompanied the session (also in Hebrew) is also accessible.

In the session, Olzhan Goldstein reported on her research. The review of the literature that's part of her research (again, in Hebrew, as a Word document) is available. In addition, the bibliography, primarily in English this time, can be downloaded separately.

We hope these resources can enrich the understanding both of those who participated in the session, as well as those who have found this page only afterwards.

Who, When and How?

2009-03-29T00:10:00.000+03:00

This past week, on March 25, the OLE unit conducted a webinar on the topic of:

Preparing future teachers for internet-aided
learning – Who, When, and How?

In this session (in Hebrew) three teacher educators at three different teacher colleges in Israel gave short presentations on their experience in teaching with ICT.

Each of the three described how she has worked not only with student teachers, but with other faculty members at her college to help their student teachers integrate ICT into their work, and to feel both that they are capable of using these technologies and that they have an important role to play in teaching.

Nitsa Waldman opened her part of the session with some important background information. Since 2004 teachers colleges have been required to teach the basics of computer use as well as the ways ICT can be integrated into the teaching of specific disciplines. What’s more, future teachers are expected to be exposed to at least 120 hours of computer use, including numerous hours in “distance learning” courses.

This background information gave perspective on the major question that the webinar attempted to deal with: Who is going to help the future teacher acquire the knowledge necessary to use ICT in the classroom in a worthwhile and educational why?

Waldman noted the various possibilities:

The pedagogic coach
The “computer” teacher
The teachers in each discipline
The school teacher by whom the student teacher is acquiring experience
Or perhaps all of these together

Waldman presented a chart representing the Koheler/Mishra Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge model (http://www.tpck.org):

She demonstrated a model for integrating the various forces involved in educating teachers in order to achieve the desired goal - a new teacher who is capable of using ICT in his or her teaching.

Waldman emphasized that previous research has shown that neither pre-service teachers, nor faculty, perceived themselves as prepared to teach with computers. In her part of the webinar, Nicole Eitan reported on her experience at Achva College. In the model that Eitan presented, the student teacher and the pedagogic coach represented two corners of a triangle, while the specialist in ICT completed the third corner.

Olzhan Goldstein reviewed research she conducted. She studied a course offered to second year students in Special Education. In this course the students learned to use both existing online resources, and to prepare digital resources by themselves, and also how to use these within the context of their work with pupils. Goldstein examined whether the students’ attitudes toward digital resources changed as a result of the course. To put things perhaps much too simply, she found that although at the beginning of their studies the student teachers had negative attitudes toward ICT, later on, particularly because their pupils were in favor of these tools, their attitudes changed.

The participants in this session weren’t passive. Many of them were also experienced ICT teachers, and in the discussion after the presentations a number of these participants reported on their own experience. In this sense, though the focus was on the presentations of the three “invited” speakers, the session definitely took on a tenor of a seminar in which all participants had something to contribute, and everyone felt they had learned something.

A blog's continuing silence

2009-03-28T22:49:00.001+03:00

If there are any followers to this blog, its extended silence (two full months) should be a sign that it hasn’t yet succeeded in finding its voice. The Online Learning Environments unit of the Mofet Institute has been very active during these past two months. It has conducted numerous Webinars on a wide variety of topics, in addition to workshops designed to provide teacher educators with digital tools they can incorporate into their instruction. But the blog has been silent.

The blog was envisioned as a tool to bring information about various OLE-initiated activities to English speaking educators. We in Israel have learned a great deal from the English language research we read. In turn, we’re convinced that our experience here as well can be instrumental in furthering the topic of ICT integration in teacher education. Of course presenting this information to the world requires translation, but that’s perhaps the easy part.

When we report here – primarily on our Webinars – our objective isn’t only to advertise ourselves. We want to share our experience, to contribute our own experience to a growing, worldwide, repository. Until now, however, we haven’t found the proper balance between sharing our insights from various sessions (and in that way also hopefully initiating discussion) and simply reporting on past (and sometimes future) activities.

We’re still trying. And we’re hopeful that we’ll succeed, and that readers will find this forum useful.

Computer Mediated Discourse

2009-01-17T20:21:00.000+02:00

Last week, on January 14, we hosted Professor Irit Kupferberg in a webinar that dealt with:

Self-construction in computer-mediated discourse: Theoretical and methodological perspectives

This was primarily in honor of chapter in a new book, edited by Thomas Hansson -

Handbook of Research on Digital Information Technologies: Innovations, Methods, and Ethical Issues

Professor Kupferberg has been involved in discourse analysis for many years, and the blossoming of internet based discussion groups has offered a wonderful opportunity to investigate written discourse detached from the signs and symbols that we're accustomed to in face-to-face interaction. She introduced us to her Four World Model that positions discourse in relation to the past, the present and the future, and to the interaction taking place.

We viewed numerous examples in which new teachers wrestled with various problems. Professor Kupferberg's model helped us glimpse into the world of these teachers, and how they saw their place in it.

For further study, Professor Kupferberg provided us with an extensive bibliography of materials related to self-construction in computer-mediated discourse.

Some information on our Webinars

2008-12-07T08:40:00.001+02:00

We're still a new blog. We've got more to report about future events than about what's already taken place in our webinars - though hopefully some discussion around those webinars, and the issues raised in them, will soon become an integral part of what appears here. In the meantime, we're still learning what the best ways to bring attention to these sessions might be. Below is a slideshare presentation - please let us know if it's useful and informative for getting the word out.

Ole Mofet Webinars Teacher Education

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

Ooh, Ooh, Ooh! What a little advertising can do!

2008-12-04T15:58:00.000+02:00

This blog is approximately a week old, and though it isn't being kept secret, it's far from in the public eye. The only people who viewed it in its first few days of existence were the OLE people who are responsible for it - and who wanted to take a look.

But yesterday, according to the Google Analytics that any responsible blogger who wants to know if anybody is actually reading what he or she writes checks (at least occasionally), views of the blog jumped last night to about thirty.

The obvious reason for this jump was a bit of advertising. Last night we held an online session (okay, a lecture from me [Jay], but that's a different story) and mentioned this blog. It's a very good guess (and perhaps even the only logical guess) that participants who were told about the blog typed in the URL and took a look. That's nice to know - and it was nice to see those visits. But we're not fooling ourselves - if nothing else happens here, those people who took a look (maybe that's you, by the way) aren't going to take more than one or two more.

So? Well, the next step seems pretty obvious - REACT! Even before the upcoming Interwise sessions, if you've got an opinion, or a question, relating to ThinkAloud, or to the New Framework for Teacher Education in Israel, add a comment about these. Hey, you can even comment on last night's lecture.

It's nice to see that people actually took a look at this blog, but if they're going to continue to do so, we need some action here.

Building Teacher Education - A Case Study

2008-11-27T09:40:00.000+02:00

How can we best prepare students to become effective and successful teachers? Though a great deal has been written on this subject, nobody (of course) has the answer. Many attempts have been made - some with better results than others. Often, a good teacher will simply say that what he or she learned while in teacher training was soon forgotten, and that the best teacher was simply experience.

The Israeli experience can perhaps be very instructive. Over the past decade a major revisal of the entire system of teacher education has taken place in the country, first via the drawing up of conceptual guidelines, and for the past year and a half their implementation in the field. In an online presentation:

The New Frameworks for Teacher Education in Israel: Rationale, Conceptual Perspectives and Implementation

Professor Tamar Ariav will discuss the two stages of this new framework. Professor Ariav, the president of Beit Berl Academic College in Israel, and a lecturer and researcher in numerous educational fields, served as chairperson of the committee that developed the rationale of the new framework, as well as of the implementation committee. Her perspective on both of these aspects of the development "The New Framework" can be particularly instructive to all educators concerned with issues of teacher training.

The online session will take place on Wednesday, December 10, 2008, 19:00 - 20:30 GMT+2. In addition to the lecture, time will (of course) be devoted to questions and discussion.

Please note - participation in this session is open to paying participants and requires downloading and installing the Interwise online communication tool. More information on these, and registration, can be found at: http://mofetitec.macam.ac.il/calendar/Pages/TheNewFrameworks.aspx

Think Aloud?

2008-11-27T00:07:00.000+02:00

Some people think that something must be wrong with them because they talk to themselves. But experienced teachers know that this is a way in which we make sense to ourselves. Sometimes we do this when we're alone - putting ideas into words helps us organize our thoughts. But it can be even more effective when we're in a group. This even has a name: think-aloud.

Think-aloud is a meta-cognitive strategy in which we think publicly about our thinking processes as teacher educators and examine them with our student teachers. Teacher educators use think-alouds to assist their student-teachers to understand how teaching and learning interact by overtly presenting aspects of their pedagogical decision making and putting these forward for discussion, analysis and criticism.

At our upcoming online session (Thursday, December 18, 2008, 20:00 - 21:30 GMT+2) we'll listen to a report of a study in the use of think-aloud conducted simultaneously by teacher educators in Israel, Australia, and Canada. We'll be meeting with the chief researchers:

Prof. Lea Kosminsky,
Kaye Academic College of Education Beer Sheva and The MOFET Institute, Israel
Prof. Tom Russell,
Queen’s University, Canada
Prof. Amanda Berry,
Monash University, Australia

This was a "self-study" in which the researchers examined their own use of think-alouds and the ways these contributed to the learning of their student-teachers. The researchers served as critical friends for each other, sharing protocols of think-aloud episodes and commenting on their insights concerning the use of the think-aloud approach.

The research on think-aloud with teacher training is still rather sparse, and we hope that this upcoming session with spark additional interesting in this promising tool.

Please note - participation in this session is open to paying participants and requires downloading and installing the Interwise online communication tool. More information on these, and registration, can be found at:
http://mofetitec.macam.ac.il/calendar/Pages/TheBoundariesofThink-Aloud.aspx

A bit about us

2008-11-26T21:50:00.000+02:00

There are already numerous, perhaps countless, blogs that deal with technology in education. Some of these report on the personal experiences of teachers in the classroom, some deal with larger philosophical issues. Many are very interesting - though even from those that aren't, much can be learned.

But who needs yet another blog of this sort? That's a hard question to answer - but we'll try, though not in a statement of purpose here, but by dealing with issues that are hopefully of interest.

The Online Learning Environments Unit of the Mofet Institute is a group of educators who offer training and support to teacher educators who have chosen to implement online teaching in their courses. The Unit conducts online activities in the form of workshops, symposiums and seminars as well as publishes an online journal in the field of teacher education.

We'll be reporting on these activities (and inviting you to attend them) here. But we also hope to engage you in discussion around these issues.