Jan Turbill

A Researcher Goes to School: Using Technology in the Kindergarten Literacy Curriculum

This study was prompted by a concern that early literacy classroom activities reflected varying practices and differing perceptions of technology, literacy and how they are related. Furthermore there seemed to be a strong resistance to the use of technology in most early literacy classrooms. These factors it seemed could only lead to greater inequity. While the initial focus question for the research began as, ‘how are teachers of young children incorporating technology into their early literacy programs?’ it soon changed to ‘why do teachers of early literacy find it difficult to implement technology into their literacy curriculum?’ Findings highlighted that implementation of technology was hindered by lack of time and expertise to explore and understand available software, teachers’ narrow definition of literacy as including only paper-based texts, and lack of understanding of and confidence in the potential of the use of technology in the early years.

Mobilizing PD: Professional development for sessional teachers through mobile technologies

The emergence of mobile technologies has changed the higher education landscape. The expansion of mobile technologies in our classrooms presents new learning opportunities not just for students but also for teachers. While professional development is core business for higher education providers, over the years, increasing attention has been afforded to the growing cohort of casual teachers typically overlooked. Sessional teachers are at the interface of learning, yet have historically experienced limited professional development. A unique opportunity is presented to utilize the flexibly of mobile technologies with the needs of time-poor, provisional sessional teachers. This chapter explores this notion and what this might look like by offering two exemplary cases. B. Dean (*) • M. Zanko • J. Turbill University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW, Australia e-mail: bonnie_dean@uow.edu.au; mzanko@uow.edu.au; jturbill@uow.edu.au # Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015 Y.A. Zhang (ed.), Handbook of Mobile Teaching and Learning, DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-54146-9_55 165 These cases demonstrate ways in which to use the affordances of mobile technologies to deliver and customize professional development, thereby embedding professional learning in practice. This is an important strategic, pedagogical, and capacity building movement that currently seems to be lacking in uptake and explication of best practice.

Transformation of traditional face-to-face teaching to mobile teaching and learning: Pedagogical perspectives

Teaching students in a face-to-face context has been and, in many institutions of education, still is the only form of teaching in higher education. However, in the past 20 years, there has been a slowly increasing movement toward transforming the higher education teaching and learning experience from face-to-face to a mobile online learning experience. For most teachers this move is quite a challenge and raises many issues and questions. These include questions such as:What mobile technologies are available to employ? What teaching practices are best to use?Will student learning outcomes be better or worse as a result? And for many the question asked is simply how can this be done? In this chapter a framework for designing and implementing “online” pedagogy is shared. This framework is underpinned by Turbill’s (From a personal theory to a grounded theory in staff development. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, 1994; The role of a facilitator in a professional learning system: the frameworks project. In: Hoban G (ed) Teacher learning for educational change: a systems thinking approach. Open University Press, Buckingham, pp 94–114, 2002) integrative theory of learning and draws on Herrington and Bunker’s (Quality teaching online: putting pedagogy first. In: Quality conversations, proceedings of the 25th HERDSA annual conference, Perth, 7–10 July 2002, pp 305–312) pedagogical guidelines. Both are unpacked and explained using a case study that provides the reader with a pedagogical perspective that is both doable and proven to be successful.

Invisible to visible: Mapping the continuum of literacy learning experiences in an early years setting:

The face of early childhood education continues to change. In Australia, the national early childhood guidelines, Early Years Learning Framework (2009) and the National Quality Framework have articulated and defined the work of early years’ educators in a range of areas, including literacy. Both frameworks state that their aim is to maintain the focus of the Development Strategy provide all Australian children with an educational foundation to support them throughout their lives. In this climate, and some years after the implementation of these guidelines, it seems timely to examine the literacy programmes, practices and perspectives of prior-to-school environments as they prepare children to transition to the early years of primary school. This paper reports on the findings of a study that aimed to explore the nature of literacy programmes, practices and perspectives, and in particular how such programmes support educators and children in one prior-to-school setting, as they prepare to transition to the first year of formal schooling. Analysis of the experiences offered in prior-to-school centres revealed a number of learning experiences that illustrated Bernstein’s notion of visible and invisible literacy learning pedagogies. It was found that viewing these learning experiences along a continuum from invisible to visible pedagogical practices was a useful framework for categorising the range of experiences in which the children engaged. It is suggested that such a continuum would be a useful framework for both prior-to-school and kindergarten teachers to better support children as they transition across settings. However, we must add a caveat, namely, that such a framework should not lead to increase pressure on prior-to-school settings to increase ‘visible pedagogical practices’ in order to ‘teach’ literacy skills.