Section archive - Programs & Practicum

In this article, the author argues that we live in a postmodern world in which the pace of the change accelerates daily. The Western world experiences a“crisis of education', in which schools become more irrelevant than ever to real life and teachers lose their authority and influence on the children's lives. This crisis should be addressed by a responsible professional educator, who questions the moral basis of the society and suggests that solidarity and communality are no less significant than individuality, privatization and competition. The author had initiated a teacher education program whose aim is to promote this vision in prospective teachers. ACE [Active-Collaborative-Education] is a teacher education program for post-graduate students conducted in Kaye Academic College of Education in Beer-Sheva.

In this explorative study, preparation of pre-service teachers for family–school partnerships (FSP) was examined within three teacher education institutions. Findings indicate that preparation for FSP is integrated in other courses. Attention is mainly focused on communication, there is no attention to models of FSP or to address underlying power relationships or barriers and there is no assessment on this topic. In primary programmes, more attention is paid to FSP then in secondary progammes. In addition, secondary respondents articulated fewer positive opinions than primary respondents.

In this article, the authors identified four schools of education in the United States that self-identified as having a fully implemented curriculum for teachers on mobile technology use in PK–12 classrooms. The findings revealed that an institutional commitment to innovation, a belief in the importance of being on the cutting edge, and expectations from local school districts were important motivators for change. Leadership and vision, institutional and administrative support, and the expectation that all faculty members participate in the implementation of the curriculum were important internal characteristics for success. Finally, increasing faculty knowledge about mobile technologies, funding, and finding the correct developmental and instructional approaches were identified as challenges by these institutions.

This study aims to establish a snapshot of the extent to which teacher educators are preparing teacher candidates to use mobile learning technologies in PK–12 class-rooms, with the goal of drawing more teacher credentialing institutions into the conversations surrounding this initiative.