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Rapid globalization and the emergence of new instructional technologies have encouraged educators to explore technologies like podcasting and blogging to enhance their teaching. This study examines how six English speakers of other languages (ESOL) teachers used podcasting and blogging to help young English learners, themselves 21st century digital citizens. The ESOL teachers used technology to develop innovative teaching methods and enhance their professional identities. Four themes emerged from the examination of ESOL teachers' uses of new technologies to increase peer engagement through deep classroom interaction: ESOL teachers' varying levels of use of instructional innovations, dialogic uses of podcasting and blogging to encourage educational engagement, the impact of innovative technology on teachers' professional identities, teaching digital-native English learners, benefits of technology for assignments, and challenges for ESOL teachers' active learning.

This study evaluated preservice teachers' professional-knowledge transformation while they participated in simulated professional-development activities via a Second Life virtual classroom—an Internet-based multiuser virtual environment (MUVE). While a cohort of preservice teachers experienced the MUVE environment, the instrumental exploratory case study highlighted how 2 preservice teachers among the 12 internalized professional knowledge, as well as how that knowledge transferred into active teaching practice. The study was framed around sociocultural theory as it pertains to enabling intramental functioning through co-constructed activities. The preservice teachers' debriefings and reflective statements suggest that they entered the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)—the range of potential an individual has for learning, with that learning being shaped by the social environment—indicating the positive potential of using an MUVE to promote self-regulatory pedagogic behaviors.