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The present study is an extension of studies that measure pre-service teachers’ Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) confidence. It provides new perspectives on pre-service teachers’ TPACK by shifting the focus to concrete concerns and strengths indicated by pre-service teachers. The target group consists of a cohort of first-year pre-service teachers (N = 86) from a Finnish university. The data used in this study were 86 lesson plans with integrated technology written by first-year pre-service teachers, with a specific section where students outlined their confident and challenging areas in the lesson plan. These sections were analysed quantitatively through the theoretical lens of TPACK. Four TPACK areas were found confident, challenging or both confident and challenging for students. For these first-year pre-service teachers, pedagogical knowledge played the most important role, and the outcomes concretize specific aspects of pedagogical knowledge that can be addressed to develop TPACK in teacher education. The results provide important perspectives on pre-service-teachers’ development of TPACK, revealing the important position of pedagogical knowledge and detailed perspectives on how pre-service teachers view their readiness to use ICT in education.

A teacher should arguably know about learning theories (LTs) in order to make daily pedagogical decisions. However, little literature exists on the role of LTs in teacher education. Eight Dutch teacher educators were interviewed on LTs in their curriculum. LTs were unanimously considered important but huge variation was found in what and how LTs are taught. Several functions of LTs were mentioned, with underpinning of pedagogical decisions using LT considered to be the essence of higher education. However, respondents doubted whether this is ever achieved. This suggests an additional paradigm – reality gap in teacher education.

This theoretical paper is concerned with conceptualising a major issue that faces all those concerned with and charged with influencing the future of equity in education—the need for digital agency (DA). The paper offers a rationale for this concern, highlights the importance of the concept and its practices, presents the challenges it brings, some current ways in which practices are tackling these challenges, and considers the theoretical foundation for how it might be addressed further in the future. The paper defines DA, and its three component parts—digital competence, digital confidence, and digital accountability. The paper argues that DA is a fundamental requirement for and through education, that it affects all citizens in a global society, and should be enabled through their ongoing and developing digital practices. The paper concludes with recommendations for different educational groups—including policy makers, practitioners, developers, and researchers.

In this study, differences were analysed between two groups of online teachers in a Master of Special Educational Needs program. One group scored high on student satisfaction and the second group received low student satisfaction ratings. Findings indicate that high satisfaction is associated with relatively long and pedagogically complex messages that are most often addressed to the whole group. These messages are characterised by careful listening to the students, elaborate on content knowledge, and show online personality and social behaviour. The research resulted in preliminary guidelines for crafting asynchronous teacher messages that positively affect student satisfaction and a scoring guideline that can be used to score the quality of online teaching as expressed in online asynchronous messages.