Social Presence in Virtual Professional Learning

Our Participatory Action Research (PAR) study explored the development and facilitation of an innovative virtual maker professional learning (PL) program during the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants included four researchers and educators from a university in southern Ontario. Findings indicate that social presence plays a particularly important role in virtual maker PL for participant engagement and learning. Virtual maker educators may experience moments of isolation, doubt and frustration which can be alleviated by making and learning in a community of practice in order to feel supported and sustained in the process.

Overview of Current After School - OST STEM Programs for Girls

Historically, there has been a gender gap within the STEM pipeline, resulting in the underrepresentation of women in STEM fields. Current efforts, both within and outside of educational institutions, have been developed to target girls’ specific needs with the aim of supporting girls' interest and engagement in STEM. The following paper examines the social and cultural factors that perpetuate the gender gap in STEM. It also provides a review and critique of six existing Canadian Out of School Time (OST) STEM programs and the principles used in their development and implementation. Conclusions from this review suggest that OST programs, when developed using best practices, may play a crucial role in encouraging girls to pursue a STEM career. Four primary best practices include: social and collaborative learning, topics related to girls' interests, development of STEM identity, and length of the program (for example, programs done over a longer period of time are generally more effective than programs completed over a shorter duration). Although the COVID-19 pandemic has caused some of these programs to migrate online, these four promising practices transcend face-to-face versus online boundaries. As a result, programs should continue to follow these pedagogical approaches to foster girls' interests in STEM. Keywords: gender inequality, out of school time programs, social learning, STEM education, STEM programming

Examining the Use of Wearable Technologies for K-12 Students: A Systematic Review of the Literature

Wearable technologies such as smartwatches, smart clothing, smart glasses, fitness trackers, and brain senor headbands are wireless body sensors designed to record physiological and physical data. Since 2015, their use has increased in K-12 classrooms, but a comprehensive investigation of student impact yet to be conducted. In this paper, we conducted a systematic review of the literature focussing on the benefits and challenges of using wearable technologies for K-12 students. Using the PRISMA approach and a thematic narrative analysis, we analyzed 29 peer-reviewed articles from 2003 to 2019. The benefits of using wearable technologies for K-12 students included providing students with voice, ownership of learning and reflection, increasing engagement and relevance, improving learning, building social presence, increasing accessibility, and differentiated instruction. The challenges of using wearable technologies for K-12 students were health and safety as well as diminished perceptions of self-worth. Finally, we explored future research directions for wearable technologies in K-12 classrooms, including improved wearables-based pedagogy, data analysis methods, data ethics, and security policies.

Supporting English Language Learners in High-Stakes Literacy Testing

In Ontario, a mandatory high-stakes standardized literacy test called the OSSLT is administered in the tenth grade. With notable failure rates and acknowledged test anxiety, students are in need of better test preparatory methods. In this article, we examine some of the challenges and analyze ways that online multimedia learning tools can be designed in order to support diverse student needs. The online tool developed in this study features learning principles and practices based on research in literacy testing and online education. Our discussion contributes new ideas and future directions for task designers and online test preparatory tools.

From Despair to Hope: A Narrative Journey to Becoming Amateur Intellectuals During COVID-19

In this narrative paper, we explore our coming-of-age as amateur intellectuals through our collaborative engagement with reflexivity during the COVID-19 pandemic. Situating our reflective acts within technology and our educational contexts we address and analyze feelings of persistent tug of war between despair and hope. Through collaborative autoethnography, we challenged our perceptions and investigated our views on educator identity as “teachers” to challenge perceptions of educator roles and responsibilities. We discuss how the COVID-19 pandemic response narrowed the role of the teacher, ultimately diminishing and destabilizing teacher identity while limiting their sense of agency. We draw on our collective experiences during the pandemic to draw a thread between the pandemic response’s effect on teaching and teacher identity, a conflicting awareness of both complicity and resistance, and our battles with the despair of necessity. By engaging in collaborative doubt and reflexivity, we discovered that we were consistently instilled with an astonishing sense of hope within our community.

Leadership in Education During COVID-19: Learning and Growing Through a Crisis

This article explores themes resulting from a group autoethnography conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic. As participants, we are education graduate students and a professor working in both formal and informal leadership roles. We met twice a week to reflect on our present experiences implementing and leading distance education during the COVID-19 pandemic and to use these reflections to (re) imagine the future alignment of technology and education. Our self-reflexive discussions uncovered common experiential themes around educator agency, technology-induced anxiety, and leadership agency. We highlight our own growth through reflection, and we suggest important leadership qualities during times of pandemics that will raise the level of motivation and engagement of school communities and have the potential to create a stronger individual and institutional sense of agency and resiliency during a time of crisis.