Digital Technology, Communities and Education by Brown Andrew Davis Niki. & Niki Davis

Author:Brown, Andrew,Davis, Niki. & Niki Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

10 Teaching with video cases on the Web

Lessons learned from the Reading Classroom Explorer

Richard E. Ferdig, Laura R. Roehler, Erica C. Boling, Suzanne Knezek, P. David Pearson and Aman Yadav

Online learning represents an important new turn for education, and particularly for teacher education and teacher professional development. Researchers have argued the need for emerging technologies for active and interactive learning in the field of teacher professional development (Beavers, 2001; Sparks and Hirsh, 1997). Although there are some limiting factors and potential problems (e.g. having a good Internet connection), there are a number of benefits that even face-to-face workshops fail to provide. Those advantages include extensive resources, opportunities for achieving specific goals, convenience, flexibility, a larger learning community and the ability to interact with emerging technologies (Yoder, 2002). Additional benefits, such as convenience of location or the reduction of time constraints, make educational opportunities more affordable and practical (Sujo de Montes and Gonzales, 2000). Teachers are also becoming increasingly engaged with online learning, suggesting that new technologies may fundamentally change their own professional development (RAND, 1995).

Literacy researchers and instructors have also noticed possibilities in web-based learning (Ferdig et al., 2002; Teale et al., 2002). Although much of the software produced has been aimed at student emergent literacy acquisition, there has been an important shift towards online professional development in both pre-service and in-service professional development. These new systems, becoming more ubiquitous in the United States with state, local and national literacy mandates (such as President Bush's ‘No Child Left Behind’ Act of 2001), combine video, graphics and text to present exciting and interactive learning environments in which teachers can explore exemplary literacy practices.

The Reading Classroom Explorer (RCE) is one such literacy pre-service tool that utilizes video cases video clips, and databases to showcase exemplary literacy instruction. The project began in 1997, and project members have been researching the use of the tool since 1998. In this chapter, we summarize and highlight the longitudinal RCE work, with the goal of answering two important questions. First, what does a successful Web-based learning environment, specifically one that utilizes video to instruct pre-service literacy instructors, look like? Second, what happens when we implement a video and Web-based learning environment into pre-service literacy classrooms?

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