New Roles For Teachers Research Articles

Social Networking Sites in the Classroom: Unveiling New Roles for Teachers and New Approaches to Online Course Design

Las herramientas web 2.0 en general y las redes sociales en particular son ampliamente usadas. Sin embargo, su uso en la ensenanza no se ha explorado a profundidad. Este articulo reporta los hallazgos de la implementacion de una red social como apoyo virtual para un curso presencial. Los hallazgos muestran que la implementacion de la herramienta tiene efectos en 5 areas administrativas: (1) administracion de la logistica del curso, (2) administracion de la informacion y el conocimiento, (3) administracion de la comunicacion, (4) administracion del trabajo por fuera de clase y (5) administracion de la facilidad de acceso. Las conclusiones de este estudio muestran que la implementacion de la tecnologia en el salon de clase implica nuevos roles para los profesores y la necesidad de usar nuevos enfoques para el diseno de cursos virtuales y de componentes virtuales. Palabras clave: Web 2.0, roles de los profesores, redes sociales, ambientes de aprendizaje mediados por TIC

Transformational Potential of Blended Learning to Personalize Foreign Language Teaching in a Non-Linguistic Higher School

The article investigates the importance of personalization of teaching a foreign language in a non-linguistic higher school through blended learning. The important role of dynamic syllabus, information and communication technology and electronic language portfolio is examined and analysed. The authors come to the conclusion that blended learning is a new educational model with great potential to increase students' outcomes and create exciting new roles for teachers. Key words blended learning, foreign language teaching, electronic language portfolio, information and communication technology, dynamic syllabus Introduction The model of a university graduate is understood as a conceptual description of learning goals, learning content and the principles of organizing the educational process in undergraduate programs. One of the major objectives of modern educational system is developing personal intellectual abilities, critical thinking skills essential for university studies across disciplines and independent learning strategies. Skills of self-study, willingness and ability to adapt to ever-changing social and economic situations are very important for modern graduates (http://www.consultant. ru/law/). Federal target program on education for 2011-2015 is aimed at ensuring accessibility of high-quality education to satisfy the requirements of innovative social- oriented development of the Russian Federation. Solving these problems involves extending the teaching environment and creating virtual classrooms through online and blended learning related to students' cognitive needs, interests and abilities. Centred on purposeful, real-life objectives universities are working to get closer to the golden ideal of every student getting exactly what they need, when they need it. It is also very important to ensure learner- centered approach in the context of generality of educational environment (Sazonov, 2011). A student-centred approach in the Russian educational system

Teachers' views on the new measurement and assessment approaches with regard to Mathematics curriculum reform

The aim of this study is to investigate teachers’ views on the new measurement and assessment approaches within the context of secondary school mathematics education reform. With this purpose, the factors which affected the implementation process were determined. The research data were obtained from two teachers via in-depth interviews, observations, and researcher’s notes and case study throughout an education year. As a result of the analysis of qualitative data with NVivo 7 program, the factors affecting the teachers’ views on the measurement and assessment aspect of mathematics curriculum were detected. The results of the study revealed that teachers’ culture about measurement and assessment, the usability of assessment tools, infrastructure conditions, new roles of teachers, lack of informing activities and the role of measurement and assessment on student learning had an effect on teachers’ views on the new measurement and assessment approaches within the context of mathematics education reform. The findings obtained pointed out that curriculum reform could not actualize the change considered for the measurement and assessment aspect. Suggestions were made for the measures to be taken and researchers in accordance with the results obtained from the research. Key words: Curriculum reform, measurement and assessment, teachers’ views.

The Goodness of Rain: Developing an Ecological Identity in Young Children by Ann Pelo

 2013 Children, Youth and Environments Children, Youth and Environments 23(3), 2013 The Goodness of Rain: Developing an Ecological Identity in Young Children Ann Pelo (2013). Redmond, Washington: Exchange Press Inc., 191 pages. $24.00 USD (paperback). ISBN 978-0-942702-55-2. As I observed a magnificent sunset full of deep reds, oranges, yellows, and twilight blue, a sense of wonderment filled my being. We are blessed to live on a planet that affords beauty at every turn, when we are attuned to nature’s glorious gifts. Sunsets like these remind us of our innate connection to the natural world, often overlooked in our fast-paced life. How do we provide opportunities that allow young children to experience these delights? In Ann Pelo’s new book, The Goodness of Rain, she urges us to consider the development of an ecological identity in young children. Just as important as the other domains of early childhood, but often ignored in our technologically based homes and academically focused schools. Ann Pelo is a teacher educator, program consultant, and author whose primary work focuses on Reggio-inspired, socially just, and ecological teaching and learning. Reminiscent of Rachel Carson, Pelo poetically describes her experience of sharing the natural world with a 1-year-old child, Dylan, over the period of one year. Her goal was to “spend each day outside, no matter the weather, experiencing the land and sky through the nuances of each unfolding season... I hoped that our days outside would cultivate in each of us an ecological identity” (31-32). Rachel Carson’s book, A Sense of Wonder, was originally written as an article in Women’s Home Companion in 1956 to help parents give children an opportunity to view the natural world with a sense of wonder: “A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement” (Carson 1956, 46). Pelo builds on this premise and provides a roadmap for teachers, as well as parents, to discover how to introduce young children to the natural world. She identifies the core dispositions that children need to develop an ecological identity: “The disposition to see, with an open heart and curious mind and humble spirit, both reflects and sustains a particular way of understanding one’s relationship to the natural world and one’s role in it” (46-47). Through a thoughtful lens, Pelo suggests several practices for helping a child develop an ecological identity: Walk the land, both silently and exclaiming. Learn the names of what we encounter there, even as we linger in sensuality and delight. Tell stories and make rituals about what we experience in the world beyond walls. Invite children to weave that green and growing world into their hearts... When Book Review: The Goodness of Rain: Developing an Ecological Identity… 198 taken together... in all their contradictory and complementary qualities, they can become a pedagogy for ecological literacy (48-49). While exploring that pedagogy, she constantly questions her methods of how to be with a young child in the natural world, when to talk and when to discover. How much to say or not to say: I wrestled with how much to talk to Dylan... so I hesitated to speak, weighing my words carefully, offering them sparingly... Out in the world, I aimed to speak with a light touch, offering explanations of what we encountered without much editorial commentary, leaving space in which the experiences could ring with their own resonance (159-160). What I appreciate most is how she works so hard to find the balance between talking and silence, teaching and sharing, feeling when each were appropriate, knowing that the experiences of the natural world were most important. Among the practices that Pelo describes, practicing silence is a new role for teachers and parents to incorporate. Claire Warden, a forest kindergarten consultant from Scotland, suggests that silence is an important ingredient for supporting children’s connection to nature. Nature offers opportunities for magical moments that are experienced through silence. Silence provides a sense of mindfulness and non-verbal communication that is powerful, in and of itself. Silence affords a deep connection to the natural world that may not be felt...

DOCENCIA VIRTUAL Y APRENDIZAJE AUTÓNOMO: ALGUNAS CONTRIBUCIONES AL ESPACIO EUROPEO DE EDUCACIÓN SUPERIOR

This article describes and analyses several typical cases of using Information and Communication Technology to teach at university. All of them show some kind of educational innovation to contribute to European Higher Education Area. Most remarkable results demonstrate a better learning content organization, the implementation of new methodological approaches to teach and new roles for teachers and students. Improvements don’t take advantage of all possibilities of virtual learning environments but they are the first step to a different approach of teaching at university. At last the study also shows the necessity of more clear policies to invest in resources and teaching training.

Enhancing teachers' ICT capacity for the 21st century learning environment: Three cases of teacher education in Korea

<blockquote>Korean teachers are generally considered well trained to integrate ICT into their teaching since the inception of the first IT Master Plan of Korea in 1996. However, the emergence and adoption of cutting-edge technologies create demands for evolving roles and competencies of teachers in the new knowledge society. Given this changing landscape of teacher education, the purpose of this paper is to explore new educational approaches to enhance teachers' ICT capabilities in the 21st century learning environment in Korea. The literature indicates that the new roles of teachers include new media literacy skills and adaptive expertise with efficiency and innovation. From this perspective, we examined three cases: (1) learning Scratch for computational and creative thinking, (2) learning robotics as emerging technology for convergent and divergent thinking, and (3) learning by design with ICT for systems thinking. The new approaches, such as focusing on thinking skills rather than technical skills, and providing various contexts different from ordinary classroom lessons, help teachers to develop adaptive expertise. On the other hand, participants in all three cases indicated difficulties in integrating new ideas, dealing with various course activities, and understanding unfamiliar design contexts in their comprehensive projects. For further studies, it is necessary to investigate learning processes and outcomes of teachers' learning with more depth and a larger number of cases and multiple sources of data to verify the potentials and challenges of these approaches more rigorously.</blockquote><p> </p>

Incorporating the Principles of Critical Pedagogy into a Teacher Efficacy Measure

Although critical pedagogy has defined new roles for teachers through which they can step beyond classroom concerns, there seems to be little attention to these roles in the conceptualization and measures of teacher efficacy. This study was an attempt to review the available literature and measures of teacher efficacy to find out whether the principles of critical pedagogy have been incorporated into operational and theoretical aspects of teacher efficacy. The absence of these principles called for including such items in one of the most recent and valid teacher efficacy measures and construct validating the new scale.

Cómo organizar el proceso de enseñanza musical de forma intercultural: propuestas para trabajar interculturalmente en el área de primaria

Este artículo pretende mostrar una aproximación a la educación intercultural mediante el proceso de enseñanza musical porque ésta es una parte de la cultura que nos habla del hombre y de su relación con el mundo. Se intenta responder a las nuevas exigencias derivadas de los procesos migratorios con actividades abiertas y flexibles, con las que los docentes adquieran un nuevo protagonismo como profesionales. Éstos necesitan nuevas competencias para desenvolverse adecuadamente en tales contextos complejos, con el trabajo en equipo como principal estrategia ante posibles problemas derivados del diseño curricular y con la integración de las nuevas tecnologías de la información y la comunicación. Con estas propuestas dotadas de objetivos interculturales e instrumentos de evaluación adecuados, se pretende asentar valores interculturales a través del enriquecimiento que supone la práctica musical y garantizar el conocimiento de las diversas culturas presentes en el aula para respetar y conocer “al otro”.

Imagining, seeking, inventing: the future of learning and the emerging discovery networks

Extrapolating from current developments in the study of learning and imagining how learning might be shaped moving forward, this article considers 12 trends concerning the future of learning. Learning will become more diverse, more contextual, less discipline-bound, and less institutionally-bound. It will span professional and institutional sectors, and move beyond national borders. It will move increasingly online and extend beyond humans to encompass machines and machine/human blends. It will become more interactive, more distributed, and more biologically connected. Drawing on an understanding of these trends, new roles for teachers and for educational institutions are developed. The result is that learning is likely to occur through multiple discovery networks that blend research and teaching to address real world problems in environments supported by robust software infrastructures. Multiple nested discovery networks will operate on a global scale and be negotiated by individual learners sometimes guided by teachers.

Improving urban science education, new roles for teachers, students and researchers

Improving urban science education, new roles for teachers, students and researchers

Improving urban science education: New roles for teachers, students and researchers

Improving urban science education: New roles for teachers, students and researchers

Improving urban science education: new roles for teachers, students, and researchers

Chapter 1 The Who, What, Where, and How of Our Urban Ethnographic Research Chapter 2 Urban Science as a Culturally and Socially Adaptive Practice Chapter 3 Painting the Landscape: Urban Schools and Urban Classrooms Chapter 4 Organizational Mediation of Urban Science Chapter 5 Playin on the Streets-Solidarity in the Classroom: Weak Cultural Boundaries and the Implications for Urban Science Education Chapter 6 All My Life I Been Po': Oral Fluency as a Resource for Science Teaching and Learning Chapter 7 Becoming an Urban Science Teacher: The First Three Years Chapter 8 The Role of Cogenerative Dialogue in Learning to Teach and Transforming Learning Environments Chapter 9 Learning Science and the Centrality of Student Participation Chapter 10 Female Sexuality as Agency and Oppression in Urban Science Classrooms Chapter 11 Meeting the Needs and Adapting to the Capital of a Queen Mother and an Ol' Head: Gender Equity in Urban High School Science Chapter 12 Paperclips + Polymers -> Problems: Learning to Use Levels of Representation in a High School Chemistry Classroom Chapter 13 An Autobiographical Approach to Becoming a Science Teacher in an Urban High School Chapter 14 Beyond Either-Or: Reconsidering Resources in Terms of Structures Chapter 15 My Cultural Awakening in the Classroom Chapter 16 Social and Cultural Capital in Science Teaching: Relating Practice and Reflection Chapter 17 Transforming the Future while Learning from the Past

Designing On-line Chinese Language Courses: New Roles for Educators

The purpose of this paper is threefold. Firstly, it will review the theories and practice of on-line learning and the need for new roles in the development of new media delivery systems. Secondly, the current status of university teachers will be analyzed within the context of the new roles. And thirdly, new roles for teachers and course designers in their endeavors to assimilate information technology (IT) into on-line teaching systems are identified. This paper suggest that most universities today still haven’t fully understood the importance of IT in education and haven’t adopted appropriate strategy and measurements in response to the im-pact of IT on education. One clear example, as pointed out by many researchers, is that universi-ties still focus on research production and ignore the teaching practice. An immediate result from this ignorance of teaching practice is inadequate teacher education and training. This situation is getting worse with the rapid development of IT, which affects all parts of educational system. Many universities understand the importance of online courses driven either by the idea of poten-tial loss of future educational market share or merely wanting to cut down daily running costs. One of the strong growing areas is foreign language teaching or LOTE (Languages Other Than English) due to the impacts of educational globalization. Many websites have been set up and many LOTE course are offered online. These online language courses are designed and imple-mented by different teachers with various backgrounds. Many of these online courses are poorly designed. For example, some courses are identical to a textbook or have “digitalized” a textbook online. Putting a textbook online does not mean an online course. Many online language courses lack interaction; the traditional way of course delivery can be seen everywhere whereas individu-alization of course content can rarely be found. All these phenomena point to one source: inade-quate education of teachers. The paper suggests that a qualified Chinese online teacher should possess four macro skills: be digitally literate, be a creative thinker, be a multi-skills possessor, and be a learning facilitator. Firstly, teachers should possess adequate knowledge that is appropriate for particular purposes. They also need the ability to find eas-ily the right information from vast amounts of information sources and have the ability to evaluate such in-formation. Secondly, a teacher should be innovative, elaborating, and a combination of the two which are es-sential towards his duties. Creative thinking allows us to generate alterna-tive concepts and practices and to es-tablish solutions effective in the ex-

Information and Communication Technologies in Class Practice: A Case Study of Secondary Physical Sciences Teachers

This paper seeks to explore the new roles that some French teachers of physical sciences are developing through the use of information and communications technology (ICT). Based on a content analysis of e-mails from a French ministry of education physical sciences mailing list and follow-up qualitative interview data with twelve teachers, it identifies and examines the perceived new roles of teachers alongside their use and appropriation of new technologies. The paper develops the argument that the introduction of ICT changes the role of physics teachers, with scientific knowledge no longer solely on the teacher's side but now shared between different sources.

Toward self-directed learning in secondary schools: what do teachers do?

Promoting self-directed learning has become an important educational goal. This goal requires a new role for teachers: not traditional transmission of knowledge but activating and process-oriented teaching. An observational study was conducted to establish the features of teaching in Dutch senior secondary education. Activating features of teaching were more predominant than the mere transmission of knowledge, but process-oriented teaching occurred very little. In other words the observed teachers did not devote much attention to teaching the students how to learn. Two patterns of activating were discerned: one pattern in which the teacher interacts with students focusing on the subject matter, and another pattern where the students are working on their own and the teacher is coaching and supervising.

Creating partnerships for generative learning and systemic change: Redefining academic roles and relationships in support of learning

The adoption of information and communications technologies (ICT) is a catalyst for innovation and evaluation of teaching, and are driving many tertiary institutions towards a reconsideration of the nature of quality learning. While the technology of online delivery receives most attention, it is arguably the management of teaching and learning that requires new approaches. Universities which have been engaged in traditional forms of distance education are considering how best to integrate communications technologies that offer alternative forms of course delivery, communication, flexible pedagogies and new roles for teachers and learners. Institutional change issues are also linked to ICT adoption: developing students' generic skills, fostering lifelong learning and catering for greater flexibility in delivery of educational services is now core business in tertiary institutions across Australia. This paper argues that such changes require tertiary teaching staff to adopt a different mindset, that of facilitating and supporting learning while assuming new roles as managers, motivators, mentors and mediators of learning. The rationale for each of these roles within Web-based learning environments is presented within a constructivist framework, which affirms and extends good teaching practice. In addition to highlighting aspects of teaching and learning that are supported and transformed by constructivist, Web-based delivery, this paper proposes that professional development is essentially about establishing partnerships for renewal of teaching values, and that staff developers need to learn the craft of supporting change at various levels: at the individual level, at the course and unit level and at the institutional level through systemic contextualized affirmation of constructivist values. Professional development for adoption of Web-based teaching requires multi-dimensional thinking. Rather than acting as a driver of top-down change, effective staff development is participatory and supportive, seeking action research partnerships where more profound changes in teacher conceptions of learning must take place before online pedagogies become part of tertiary teaching culture.

Reconstructing the teaching of language: a view informed by the problems of traditional literacy in a digital age

In the authors' work at the University of Ghent they focus on the problem of cultural literacy in a digital age. In the first part of this article they confront the reader with recent complaints about our postmodern culture, mainly inspired by a back-to-basics movement. In the second part they consider or ‘problematise’ literacy in a postmodern and post-print society. In the third part they focus on ‘language and literature’ in a digital age–questioning the profession of language and literature teachers today. In the fourth part they try to describe how digital screens change our attitude towards books, culture and education in general, and writing and reading in particular. Changes in technology influence how we consider literacy in general and our ideas about learning and teaching in particular. In the fifth part they describe different new roles for teachers which have been influenced and even created by the digital revolution. From their educational viewpoint, the authors suggest a new kind of literacy is needed, starting from the fact that literacy is always constructed–situated–in a particular context. The discussion about the progress or the decline of our literacy should be situated in a historical, contextual framework. A historical perspective teaches us that literacy is a process rather than a product. When we know where our concepts of literacy come from, and how they are embedded in a cultural context, we will be able to understand how it evolves. Only such an understanding can provide an adequate basis for discussing the issues of language teaching and teacher training with new technologies and media.

Exploring a new role for teachers: promoting learner autonomy

Language teachers have a new role: helping their students develop autonomy in learning. How can language teachers aid their learners in becoming autonomous? How do learning strategies contribute to learner autonomy? How can the promoting of autonomy be incorporated into the teaching and learning of second languages? This article reports an attempt to teach students how to learn and how to become autonomous in their own language learning by combining learning strategy instruction with the content course of second language acquisition. It describes how the course requirement — the language learning project — is helpful in guiding students through the process of self-assessment, goal-setting, planning, monitoring and evaluating their own language learning. Students' attitudes and reactions toward the semester-long strategy training and their evaluation of strategy development are reported, along with suggestions to help teachers succeed in such a process.

Reflections From the Field on ICT and New Roles for Teachers: Conditions for Success

This article is a sequel to the paper by the same authors appearing in the last issue of the journal, and it presents the expert opinions of 65 individuals in the field of education on the implications for teachers when moving from a teaching model to a learning model through the use of information and communications technology (ICT). The need for teachers to acquire new skills and competencies is strongly stressed. However, well‐adapted and ongoing teacher training is felt to be critical to a successful integration of ICT in the learning process. As in Part I, comments from various interviewees are quoted with an indication of their source.

Changing Talk About Text: New Roles for Teachers and Students

Many language arts educators champion discussion as a way of building and deepening reader response to literature. This article of- fers a theoretical perspective on how and why different ways of talking about text can be so important for learning to read literature.