This study examines 105 pre-service and in-service teachers’ perceptions of the importance and helpfulness of digital technologies for their learning and their teaching as well as their perceived competence and level of interest in digital technologies. The descriptive statistics from an online survey show that all respondents (n = 105) found collaboration tools, learning management systems, and supplemental video the most helpful for both teaching and learning, and found podcasts, social media, and mobile apps to be the least helpful and important for both teaching and learning. The findings of this study have implications for in-service teachers, pre-service teachers, school administrators, and teacher educators. This study indicates a need to further examine how pre-service and in-service teachers’ beliefs about digital technologies influence their process of designing instruction and choosing whether to or how to use these technologies in their classrooms.
Various educational technologies have been advanced as potential vehicles to transform teaching and learning. Still, research studies have documented that primary school teachers struggle to integrate technology in meaningful ways. This article presents the findings of a year-long study in which the author frequently observed three primary school teachers’ enactments of technology into their mathematics teaching. Each teacher was observed between 25 and 30 times during the school year. The types of technologies used as well as the types of mathematical tasks and problems that participants posed while teaching with technology were inductively analyzed. Inductive qualitative analyses indicated that participants’ technology use focused on presentation technologies such as the document camera or interactive whiteboard more than computer-based technologies or interactive activities. Further, teachers varied widely in their enacted pedagogies while integrating technology, and two participants demonstrated more frequent enactments of learner-centered pedagogies toward the end of the school year. Implications for researching teachers’ use of technology in the future are also shared.
There continues to be an abundance of research conducted and published about online learning in K-12 settings. In this systematic review, 386 articles on K-12 online teaching and learning published between 2000 and 2019 were reviewed for research themes, participants, school type, research methodologies, and data collection methods. The data was analyzed by the two decades 2000 to 2009 and 2010 to 2019 and showed significant increase in the second decade. There was an increased growth in the number of publications until 2016 after which it stabilized. About 60% of the studies were published in the United States. Areas that are most and less frequently researched are reported and discussed. The article provides implications and recommendations for future research for online learning in K-12 settings. Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/15391523.2021.1940396.