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Filling in the gaps: Linking theory and practice through telecollaboration in teacher education

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 February 2013

Melinda Dooly
Affiliation:
G5-107, Ciències de l'Educació, Campus Bellaterra, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 08193 Cerdanyola del Vallès (Barcelona), Spain (email: melindaann.dooly@uab.cat)
Randall Sadler
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 4080 Foreign Languages Building, MC-168, 707 S. Mathews Ave. Urbana, IL 61801 (email: rsadler@illinois.edu)

Abstract

This article discusses a two-year telecollaborative project in teacher education that took an integrated approach to teaching about and through technological resources in order to introduce student-teachers to innovative methods for communicative-based language learning through computer-mediated communication (CMC). Via ‘technological immersion’, student-teachers in two groups in Spain and the US were required to work together online to give peer feedback and evaluation of several activities, including teaching sequences. They also co-created podcasts, along with accompanying educational activities. Some of the tools used were Moodle, Skype, emails, wikis, Second Life and podcasting. The article analyzes and discusses multimodal data collected during the collaboration. Results indicate that the online collaboration enhanced teacher development through opportunities unavailable in more traditional teacher education classrooms and enabled student-teachers to better make connections between theory and practice.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © European Association for Computer Assisted Language Learning 2013

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