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Over a three-year period, academics from the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, The University of Melbourne, have partnered with a range of academics to facilitate an elective subject for pre-service teachers (PSTs).. These academics include staff from the Faculty of Science (The University of Melbourne), the Victorian Space Science Education Centre (VSSEC) and the Gene Technology Access Centre (GTAC) Together we have sought to develop and strengthen their teaching in the area of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education. Students in this subject were supported to develop 21 st century skills that enabled them to work effectively in Professional Learning Communities (PLCs). Pre-service teachers observed and responded to each other's teaching providing real time feedback using 'Padlet' (a readily available web based application). Following each lesson students used the resultant 'Padlet' data as a prompt to promote reflective discussion. We analyse excerpts of Pre-service teacher responses to an online survey as a means to gain some understanding of their perception of working in this way. Additionally, Padlet feedback was thematically analysed in an effort to understand how teacher candidates focussed their feedback and limitations of this approach to facilitating professional development. Through adoption of this tool, critical collaborative reflection was fostered.

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The need for students to engage in critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and creativity when utilizing digital technologies is well established given the current push to prepare our students for future work expectations, often referred to as Industry 4.0. In this chapter, 54 Grade 5 students participated in online collaborative mathematical problem solving over a period of 9 weeks. Text-based discussion and software derived artefacts were investigated in an effort to understand how this approach aligns with these expectations. An examination of the frequency/density of technical mathematical vocabulary use and identified examples, Talk Types is used as a means to understand how often students within the online environment are likely to be engaged in work that might be considered productive. The findings of this study suggest that utilizing online synchronous and asynchronous collaborative learning platforms for the purposes of mathematical problem solving is a small but important approach to preparing students for the era of Industry 4.0.

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