Teacher Learning and Technology

Emerging networked and mobile technologies provide new opportunities for the practice of teaching. They can also place new demands on teachers. Teachers must learn how to use these new technologies, acquiring fundamental ‘technology literacy’. They must also learn to productively integrate them into their existing teaching practices. For example, a science teacher might need to learn how to integrate a powerful weather simulation that includes several manipulable variables within an existing science lesson.

Moreover, teachers must learn to integrate these tools as part of their own changing practices. For example, teachers are increasingly supporting student learning within complex technology-mediated educational arrangements, for example online, hybrid, and personalized learning environments. Thus, teachers need to learn new skills around collaboration, online communication, and coordination.

Much existing work has distilled key principles of high quality professional development for teachers. However, much less evidence exists on how to best prepare teachers to teach in technology-rich environments. It is also unclear on the best ways to provide this preparation (e.g., as workshops, summer institutes, online). It is also important to consider ongoing support for teachers as they learn these new practices, for example within online or face-to-face teacher communities of practice.

Learning Science research has typically addressed these questions with a socio-technical lens. In terms of teachers, this view examines interactions between social systems (e.g., the teachers’ schools, classrooms), the people the teachers interact with in those systems (e.g., their students, caregivers), and the affordances of the digital tools to best support productive and transformative teacher learning in ways that ultimately benefit their own students’ learning.