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The purpose of this study is to reveal the opinions of pre-service teachers regarding the teaching of digital storytelling, which is one of the methods where students actively participate in the learning process, produce content, and learn while having fun, unlike the conventional methods. The research was undertaken as a case study. The study was carried out in Gazi University in the 2015-2016 academic year. The results of the research suggest that the pre-service teachers were mostly pleased with the digital storytelling task. Pre-service teachers who studied in groups were more satisfied and the pre-service teachers believed that digital storytelling positively affected many higher-order thinking skills, creativity in particular. Although higher-order thinking skills are not expected to improve with such short tasks, it can be suggested that the topic may have a positive effect.

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This chapter reveals the trends of the research conducted in between 2007-2012 on distance education theories. The literature was examined and analyzed based on theories, topics, research methods, statistics used, and the data collected in the research. Within this scope, full-text papers in the databases of EBSCO, Springer, Elsevier e-Reference, ERIC, JSTOR, SAGE, and ULAKBIM were reviewed, and a total of 209 articles were identified. The analysis outlines the trends in distance education and attempts to determine the deficiencies and gaps. The discovery of deficiencies and gaps are believed to not only raise awareness about the existing needs but also guide further studies.

Pre-service teachers are expected to use new technologies such as Google+ which facilitates contacting, sharing in certain environments and working collaboratively with the help of cloud support in their lessons effectively. This study aims to examine pre-service teachers’ opinions regarding the use of Google+ to support lesson activities. In this study the data was collected using semi-structured interview techniques carried out with pre-service teachers (n=15) chosen by purposeful sampling. The purposes of using Google+ were sharing, chatting and communication, whereas Google Docs was mostly used for its efficiency, interaction, the prudential purpose of use and to support teaching. When the views of the pre-service teachers regarding the use of Google+ were examined it was found that interface being thought to be more complex than other social networks affected the teachers’ first impressions negatively. As the negative first impression towards Google+ changed in time, it was stated to have provided a number of teaching opportunities. Some suggestions regarding the opportunities Google+ offers were also made.Keywords: Google+, social networks, pre-service teachers’ opinions, cloud computing.