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This chapter presents a critical case study on the use of information technology in a pre-service teacher education program. The authors integrated Weblogs (blogs) into two constructivist-oriented teacher preparation courses with the goal of helping students learn to think like a teacher through enhanced inquiry, collaboration, and feedback. The authors found that, through the use of blogs, pre-service teaching candidates grew in their abilities to reflect on their own teaching and to provide constructive comments to peers. The authors’ experience also indicated that while instructor and peer feedback via blogs was valuable, it functioned best when paired with face-to-face meetings between the instructors and students. They discussed design principles for combining online and face-to-face environments and offer possibilities for the expanded use of blogs in pre-service teacher education.

When an education professor and a reference librarian sought to improve the quality of undergraduate student research skills, their partnership led to a new focus on assessing the literature review process in addition to the product. In this study, we reflect on our collaborative experience introducing information literacy as the foundation for undergraduate teacher education research skills.  We examine the outcomes of this collaboration, focusing on the assessment of the process. Using a mixed methods approach, we found that direct instruction supporting effective literature review research strategies positively impacted student projects. Our data also suggest that undergraduate students benefit from not only sound literature review strategies, but also organization strategies.

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In this chapter, the researchers used an ethnographic stance to demonstrate how conversation evolved within a social media platform. They investigated the online discussions and face-to-face dialogues between teacher educators and pre-service teachers. They compared the participants’ reciprocal conversations within this case study to analyze patterns in the language used in each forum in order to identify the affordances and constraints of perceived understanding. Through this discourse analysis the authors sought to identify indicators of each participant’s metacognitive development while engaging in an online book discussion through a social media platform. Data analysis indicated that there was metacognitive growth when comparing the initial reciprocal conversations with the final conversations.