Search

The potential of social media technology has made its use a daily habit among individuals, institutions, and communities. However, several studies on technology adoption, especially social media use in education, focus more on its impact on the student than the teacher, who is generally perceived as a key stakeholder. This study used purposive sampling to select teachers who taught grades 7-10 and had used social media in their teaching activities. In-depth interviews were carried out with participating teachers to get their opinions and perspectives about how they used social media in their teaching activities (N=11). Inductive and deductive coding were used for the latent content analysis and four categories emerged: (1) SM technology in the classroom, (2) positive perceived contextual affordances, (3) negative perceived contextual affordances, and (4) support for social media. Results of the study show that, besides the schools' learning management systems, YouTube was the major SM app that was regularly used by participants in their lessons. Also, all participating teachers expressed their interest in teaching with social media. However, they cited some challenges as weaknesses towards social media use in teaching.

This study examined the influence of personal factors, school factors and practices performed on job stress and satisfaction. Quantitative research design and purposive sampling method were employed to sample school heads from senior high schools. Data was collected using a self-reported survey questionnaire and was analysed using exploratory, confirmatory and regression analysis to explore the relationships. In the results a high proportion of school heads are satisfied but feel stressed about their job and age, type of school, experience, position and practices performed, had a varied influence on job stress and job satisfaction. The authors advised on building the capacity of school heads in improving their health and performance.

In this article, we present a study on teachers' perceptions about Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a tool to support teaching in Estonian K-12 education. Estonia is promoting technological innovation in education. According to the Index of Readiness for Digital Lifelong Learning (IRDLL), Estonia was ranked first among 27 European countries. In this context, our goal was to explore teachers' perceptions about cutting-edge technologies (in this case, AI) and to contextualize our results in the scope of Fairness, Accountability, Transparency and Ethics (FATE). We carried out a survey with 140 Estonian K-12 teachers and we asked them about their understanding and concerns regarding the use of AI in education and the challenges they face. The analysis of the survey responses suggests that teachers have limited knowledge about AI and how it could support them in practice. Nonetheless, they perceive it as an opportunity for education. The results indicate that teachers need support in order to be efficient and effective in their work practice; we envision that AI can be used to provide this support. Furthermore, we identified challenges that relate to the socio-cultural context of the study: for example, teachers perceived AI as a tool to support them in accessing, adapting and using multilingual content. To conclude, we discuss the findings of this work in relation to ethical AI, and elaborate on the implications and future aspects of this work in the context of FATE and participatory design of learning environments.

Originally introduced in several policy documents issued by different institutions belonging to the European Union (EU), the term responsible research and innovation (hereafter RRI) has gained considerable attention in recent years among researchers coming from different backgrounds and disciplines. RRI constitutes an attempt to articulate a theoretical framework that would shape the governance of science in Europe. While science education is mentioned in various EU policy documents as one of its strategic dimensions, the way in which RRI can actually be translated into science education is a topic that needs empirical investigation as well as theoretical elaboration. The overall aim of the paper is precisely to offer that. In the present article, we posit that RRI in science education can be experienced meaningfully by linking it to inquiry-based learning, which already stresses the importance of active participation as well as students' responsibility for discovering knowledge. To see this potential connection in practice, we conducted an ethnographic study involving seven Estonian science teachers, who agreed to be observed at least 3 times when they conducted inquiry-based learning lessons in their school. Specifically, the study aimed at acquiring a better understanding as to the meaning that the term responsibility can have during the different phases of inquiry-based lessons. The results of the ethnographic study allow us to come to the conclusion that RRI can be interpreted in science education as a type of meaningful engagement in and for an inquiry during which the students are given the opportunity to make meaningful decisions in the different inquiry phases and thus be able to take responsibility for the inquiry process.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought challenges to the educational system on micro, meso or macro levels. In this article, we posit that the current emergency augmented, what we call the meso space, while at the same time representing a sort of magnifying glass to observe and examine how distance education tools, practices and new forms of collaboration can emerge within the patterns of re-organising. This article focuses on the meaning of the COVID-19 emergency-related changes in the field of educational technologies from a theoretical and practical perspective. While the article mainly represents a theoretical contribution, the main conclusions are derived from, illustrated and substantiated with an ethnographic case study based on Italian teacher online communities. As a result, while this article proposes much-needed theorising in the field of educational technologies during the COVID-19 crisis, it also brings insights into the practice with EdTech tools and teacher professional development.

In this work, we theorise the role of the educational technologist in an educational institution as a "variety-handler". That is, we theorise the educational technologist as responsible for the orchestration of educational and technical resources, namely tools, either to attenuate systemic variety or amplify regulative variety at a certain level of recursion. To do so, we carried out a single case study that focused on the work of the educational technologist in a Music College. The educational technologist provided support to an accordion teacher and his student in remote music lessons. We collected qualitative data from the practice of the educational technologist and the experience of both the teacher and the student over six months (mainly observations and interviews) and we analyzed them building on research from managerial cybernetics, in particular, Stafford Beer's Viable System Model (VSM). Our case study indicates that, depending on the context, the educational technologist may overtake many roles, such as be a designer, technician, researcher, planner and so on. But the central role is that of handling variety in order to avoid disruption that could potentially affect the lesson negatively.

The main aim of the present study is to assess whether the open learner model (OLM) is capable of promoting students' active thinking by enhancing their self-regulation in online higher education learning environments. To this aim, we systematically reviewed the literature of the last three decades and found 67 articles, of which only a sample of 15 were considered. Based on the findings, we performed a narrative analysis of the studies concerning technological features of OLMs that cater to the three main aspects concerning self-regulated learning, namely, cognition, metacognition and motivation. Our analysis of the literature confirmed that these three aspects are all subject to some measure of influence. In mutually interacting, these three components support learners to reach a better understanding of their learning process. Specifically, it seems that mostly all three type of OLMs, inspectable, negotiable, and co-operative, with simple and complex graphical presentation of their learner models and capacity to colour-code and compare--alike appear optimal for augmenting cognition, metacognition, and motivation. They seemingly do so through offering a wealth of techniques pertaining to knowledge, difficulties, and misconception visualization. The results presented suggest that OLMs have a positive impact on learners' active thinking regarding their learning process.

Estonia has since the liberation from the Soviet Union in 1991 successfully branded itself as a digital society and an education nation. This transformation builds on a sociotechnical imaginary where the progression of learning and the advancement of future citizens is postulated by a restructuring of the classroom through digital solutions. In this case study, we look at a prototype of a future classroom that was set up at the Estonian pavilion at the world fair EXPO 2020 in Dubai, as part of a nation branding process, promoting the nation's educational system and prosperous ed-tech sector. The future classroom was promoted using slogans and futuristic visuals that targeted foreign investors and policy makers, in a way that suggested that the anticipated digital future already exists in Estonia, and therefore, is available for foreign investment, while at the same time connecting to a national and historical narrative of Estonia as part of the European cultural sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]