Mobile Technologies Supporting Professional Learning Communities Within Pre-service Teacher STEM Education

Abstract

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.

Online Technologies in STEM Education

“…According to the majority of researchers, online-education is not able to completely replace work in the classroom and laboratory, and attempts to teach mainly online lead to low effectiveness, rapid dropout and students usually do not achieve their academic goals [25]. Meanwhile, online-education improves the quality of class collaboration that naturally occurs while working on a project within STEM education and simultaneously provides an opportunity to extend the time of interaction between participants through online communication and information exchange [11,18]. Online-education does not replace the main elements of STEM, but makes easier sharing of the information between the participants and the teacher in the learning process.…”

“…According to Radloff and Guzey [17], video information plays an important role in advancing the process of studying and improving the STEM methodology. The online courses can include the use of YouTube videos, as well as special videos posted in the cloud-based resources with limited access, recorded classroom lessons according to the STEM methodology, also, teacher's comments and solutions to their tasks online in Records [18]. All these types of video materials are widely used in structured STEM programs developed and implemented by European and American universities [19,20].…”

“…AR acts as markers and tags in the performance of educational tasks and the study of objects from personal experience. Thus, AR even allows doing what is impossible to do "face to face" with the teacher in the classroom: to observe the subject from the inside or in chemical and atomic bonds; to monitor the ongoing physical process in slow motion at different stages; to study a subject or process from different perspectives simultaneously [3,18]. Likewise, AR mechanisms make it easy to implement hints in the process of completing tasks or finding answers to a task in the real world.…”