Active learning with five collaborative learning tools

This paper reports a case study of developing pre-service teachers’ language teaching skills by applying a set of eLearning tools in a Lesson Study approach. Supporting the sustainable development of language teaching skills of pre-service teachers in our knowledge society is a critical issue in teacher education. The study integrated e-learning activities, eLearning tools and collaborative action research in a Lesson Study course to develop pre-service teachers instructional design skills for language teaching. This study adopted an experimental design. The eLearning tools included Zotero for supporting effective citation, Google Alert for retrieving resources, Google Drive for documents storing and co-editing, Prezi for effective presentation and EverNote for note-taking were introduced to the experimental group. The Lesson Study course provides 30 pre-service teachers with a different degree of opportunities to carry out instructional design, lesson implementation for language teaching and reflection through e-learning and collaborative action research activities assigned during the on-line lessons and after class discussion. Another Lesson Study course with 30 participants was selected as a control group. A Solomon four group quasi-experimental research design was used to collect data. Results showed that the injection of e-learning activities using the tools in the Lesson Study course had an impact on most of the pre-service teachers in terms of nurturing their competencies on instructional design and assessment strategies for language. Discussion, cooperative learning, task-based learning and modelling were identified as effective teaching strategies that integrated with the eLearning tools for developing preserver teachers with instructional design.