Teaching development grants final and financial report: Enhancing student teachers’ professional development in field experience by using cloud services and mobile technology

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/voew.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 a new understand and appreciations (Boud et al., 1985:19). Besides, it also facilitates the creation of a learning commun! ity 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 (e.g. Apple iPad2) 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 f! eedback 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. This project aims to adopt mobile technology and cloud services to create a convenient and efficient environment to enhance students teachers’ professional development in Field Experience. The digital forms of FE documents such as TP supervision forms, FE portfolios, and reflective journals are also convenient for student teachers and Institute supervisors to build their own e-portfolio. Colleagues from five departments across three faculties, the School Partnership and Field Experience Office (SPFEO) and Centre for Learning. Teaching and Technology (LTTC) will be involved in this project.