Two students at a Canadian university perceived there was a lack of opportunities for peer mentoring support in their teacher education program. They approached a faculty member to co-create and research a blended peer mentoring support program embedded in a first-year education course. This study documents the journey of these two students as co-inquirers in a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) project. Through online surveys and interviews, first-year teacher candidates and faculty involved in the blended peer mentoring program identified four key benefits: new perspectives and expansion of ideas, positive and encouraging reinforcement, supportive connection with second-year students, and probing questions to think more deeply. Conversely, three major challenges were uncovered with the use of digital technologies to support this blended approach to peer mentoring: lack of email notification from the institution's learning management system (LMS) with regards to the peer mentors' online contributions, the impersonal nature of online peer mentoring, and the limited number of peer mentors. The major recommendation from this study was to create a blended program assignment to provide all second-year teacher candidates with the opportunity to learn how to serve as peer mentors to students just entering the teacher education program.

My research project is focused on how technology use can affect communication skills in children for their future. Conducting research through literature and surveys, I learned about both positive and negative uses of technology in classroom situations. I found that many people believe that the increased technology use our society is experiencing has a negative effect on children's' communicative future. However, there were also some findings that technology can have a positive impact on communication. These findings can help teachers and parents ensure their children are developing healthy communication skills. 3 schools, I have realized there is a place for technology in the education system. This discovery is what made me want to research the topic. I wanted to know how technology can be beneficial for communication development, and I also wanted to know how it can damage communication skills in youth. In my future teaching practice, I want to ensure I am implementing technology into my classroom, but I want it to be in the most successful ways. I want my students to be as successful as possible, while still being interested and engaged in the learning process. Not only do I want my students to do well in school, I want them to have the skills to create a healthy personal life for themselves, so they have a promising future in all areas, especially communication and relationships. Background As I began to research further into this topic, I realized it is a relatively new area of interest. Not a lot of research has been done on the connection between the use of technology and communication skills. I did manage to find a number of literature sources, consisting of journal and newspaper articles. The research included in the literature was mainly based on observations and personal opinions of the authors. Although finding literature on this topic was challenging, I found a couple of sources that really helped me. Herman (2012) wrote an article explaining how increased technology use has impacted communication skills in youth. She investigated how important face-to-face communication is, and provided suggestions on how teachers and parents can help foster healthy communication development in their children while still letting them engage in technology use.Another article by Babic (2012) focused on children using technology in the classroom. She put her focal point on how important it is for students to have access to one-on-one technological devices. In the article "Effects of Technology on Communication," both the positive and 14 communication is thr[ough] participation" (Survey participant 14). If group work is being utilized in the classroom, even if technology is being used, children are still communicating with each other in a face-to-face context, and learning many valuable communication skills. I think another great idea is having specific times of day in the classroom where technology can be used, and restrict it from all other times of the day. Another alternative is to only use technology when it is abs...