Teaching development grants final and financial report: Building a Community of Practice (CoP) to enhance student teachers' professional development in Field Experience via web technologies

Field experience at the Hong Kong Institute of Education (HKIEd) is viewed as a central aspect to our programmes (see http://www.ied.edu.hk/spfeo/view.php?secid=1589) . One of the major reasons is that it encourages student teachers to innovate and reflect on their practice within a supportive environment as part of their professional development process. Reflection provides an avenue for students to recall and retell the types of intellectual and affective activities that they engaged in and how to lead to new understanding and appreciations (Boud et al., 1985:19). Besides, it also facilitates the creation of a learning community in which student teachers, supporting teachers and Institute supervisors can learn together and so mutually enhance their professional development. On the other hand, mobile technology and cloud services help to facilitate the creation of this kind of learning community in which student teachers can get support from their Institute supervisor and peers at anytime, anywhere and any place. Cloud services offers many possibilities to educators for its use, whether for communicating with students through social networking services like Facebook, sending out updates via Twitter, providing online tutoring, or having students collaborate on their writing using a wiki. As the cost of tablet PCs becomes affordable for local educators, Institute supervisors can make use of this type of mobile device to access cloud-based storage and services during the school visits. Furthermore, professional dialogues will be flexibly in varied digital forms and no longer restricted to verbal comments during pre/post-lesson conferences and written feedback on the FE supervision forms. Besides the cloud-based communication channels, the FE supervision forms can be annotated with rich media and also links to Internet resources. The TDG project (TDG T0105) adopted mobile technology and cloud services to create a convenient and efficient environment to enhance student teachers’ professional development in Field Experience. Based on this concrete ground work and the cases done, we proposed to establish a Community of Practice (CoP) to enhance student teachers’ professional development in Field Experience via web technologies. The new project aims to further promote good practice of using mobile technology and cloud services in higher education institutions.