Introduction. Several studies show that one of the essential factors in the way teachers use

This article theorizes the construction of a classification framework to explore teachers' beliefs and pedagogical practices for the use of digital technologies in the classroom. There are currently many individual schemas and models that represent both developmental and divergent concepts associated with technology-enabled practice. This article draws from a depth of literature in this field to synthesize a classification framework used as an analytic tool to interpret technology-enabled practice. The framework was drawn from literature covering teachers' epistemic beliefs, pedagogical beliefs, pedagogical approaches, technological competency, and perceived levels of learning. It emerged as a result of the need to analysis case study data from a large-scale research project into the effective use of digital games in the classroom: Serious Play: Digital Games, Learning and Literacy for Twenty First Century Schooling. Yin suggests the use of a uniform framework to enable cross-case synthesis. The framework provides an analytical tool to help interpret why and how teachers are using, in this case, digital games in their classrooms. It also provides a significant contribution to the variances in technology-enabled practice along the traditional-constructivist continuum as well as to the relationship in how teacher beliefs direct pedagogical practice and choice of technologies used for learning.

For some years now, the scientific community has been studying how videogames foster acquisition of mental representations of the world around us. Research to date suggests that the efficiency of videogames as learning tools largely depends on the instructional design in which they are included. This article provides empirical evidence related to the use of the videogame Angry Birds and how it can modify students’ conceptions regarding object motion. We selected a sample of 110 16- to 17-year-old students in postcompulsory secondary school. Both quantitative and qualitative data are provided. Our results show that (a) merely playing Angry Birds does not produce significant learning, (b) learning occurs when Angry Birds is guided by epistemic goals. Students who used the videogame in this way were able to recognize more variables, provide better explanations, and understand more fully the relationship between angle and distance, (c) naïf belief regarding the effect of mass on falling objects (“mass-speed belief”) remained unchanged after using Angry Birds guided either pragmatic or epistemic goals, and (d) there was no significant difference between students who worked collaboratively in pairs and those who worked individually. In the light of these results, we discuss potential implications for the future.

Purpose This paper presents rESSuME: Employability Skills Social Media SurvEy, which is a tool developed to understand if and how employers screen candidates’ social media (SM) to identify personal employability attributes. In doing so, the purpose of this paper is to shed light into the potential mismatch between the personal purpose of SM and recruiters’ job-related use of this data. Design/methodology/approach rESSuME maps personal employability attributes to elements of Facebook (FB). It was delivered to 708 employers in the UK and the USA. The 415 completed surveys were statically analysed. Findings More than 75 per cent of those surveyed use FB to screen most candidates. Loyalty and reliability are the personal attributes employers most search for. They look for personal attributes examining posts, comments and photos. Country and gender differences are also reported. While in the USA, they focus on determining whether candidates have good appearance, in the UK they are more interested in gauging if candidates are reliable. Females are more concerned with establishing whether candidates display common sense than their male counterpart. Originality/value This work is the first to articulate a rationale and systematic approach to screen candidates’ SMPs to: identify personal employability attributes and systematically map personal attributes to features of FB. Thus, it contributes a novel, systematic and structured tool to do so: rESSuME. It is the largest study with recruiters to date and the first to provide empirical evidence on how candidates’ SMPs are screened: what personal employability attributes do recruiters looked for in SMPs; and what sections and features of FB do recruiters looked at to identify the candidates’ personal employability attributes.

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