Federica Olivero

Seeing Is Believing: Using Videopapers to Transform Teachers' Professional Knowledge and Practice.

Gaps, barriers, boundaries and walls are words often used to describe the separation between educational research and practice. They account for the differences that are said to exist between the ‘two cultures’; the members of which appear to occupy different worlds, have different mindsets and express themselves in different discourses. The purpose of this paper is to suggest ways of overcoming this divide by presenting a new genre of publication, videopaper, that integrates and synchronizes different forms of representation, such as text, video and images, in one cohesive document. We argue that this has the potential to end the elision in the educational community which sees researchers as knowledge generators and teachers as knowledge translators. We contend that videopaper has a range of affordances that may help the professional and academic communities to find new ways of seeing, creating and using educational research.

Videopapers as a Tool for Reflection on Practice in Initial Teacher Education

This article will discuss issues concerning the potential of videopapers, drawing on a research project investigating the use of videopapers as a tool for reflecting on practice and as an assignment in initial teacher education. Student teachers engaged in initial teacher education programmes often find it difficult to ‘see’ what is going on in their classrooms. They can further experience difficulties in linking theory and research with observations of experienced teachers and their own practice. Although the authors already provide opportunities to reflect on practice underpinned by theory in current classroom‐based tasks and assignments, and encourage optional videoing of lessons and seminar presentations, they believe that introducing student teachers to videopapers as a learning tool can provide novice teachers and their tutors with unique, new learning opportunities and insights. However, writing a videopaper does throw up new challenges.

CONJECTURING IN OPEN GEOMETRIC SITUATIONS USING DYNAMIC GEOMETRY: AN EXPLORATORY CLASSROOM EXPERIMENT

In this paper I describe a classroom teaching experiment carried out with a class of Year 10 students. This experiment was twofold. On the one hand it was aimed at developing and trying out a new mode of working in the classroom, taking into account the possibilities offered by dynamic geometry software as support in the conjecturing and proving process in geometry. On the other hand, from the research point of view, it provided the possibility of testing out in the classroom a theoretical model describing and interpreting students’ use of Cabri-Géomètre in open geometric problems, with a particular focus on dragging. The main findings relate to the evolution in the use of dragging in Cabri and the production of rich conjectures, which can provide the basis for development and evolution towards the proving process.

Introduction to the themed articles on videopapers

Taylor and Francis RTPE_A_425724.sgm 10.1080/1 7 9390903255502 echnology, Pedagogy and Education 475-939X (print)/1747139 (online) Origi a Articl 2 09 & Francis 8 30 000October 2 09 F deric Olive o .O ive o@bri tol.ac.uk VideoPaper Builder was initially developed in 2001 through the National Science Foundation project at TERC in Boston, USA. After four years and two subsequent software upgrades, the project came to an end (Cogan-Drew, this issue) but use of the software has increased since then. This themed issue of Technology, Pedagogy and Education draws on a symposium presented by the authors at the EARLI conference in 2007 and brings together state-of-the-art research on the use of videopapers as an innovative tool in the context of teacher education and professional development.