Teaching Teachers for the Future: Modelling and Exploring Immersive Personal Learning Networks

The world in which teachers are working is one, thanks to collaborative technologies, in which high levels of interactions among colleagues and the wider educational community can be facilitated. The question, then, is about how to prepare new entrants to the profession to be effectively engaged in this professional reality. In this paper, we report on our initiative to redesign a pre-service primary science education program to explicitly value personal learning networks, discursive learning spaces and metacognitive thinking. A range of e-learning tools that could support these learning objectives were trialled, creating learning spaces for both large and small group learning experiences, including informal, personal and public forms of engagement. We present a profile of the pre-service teachers and their levels of knowledge about the technologies, the change to the lecturer’s practice and experiences provided to students, along with stories which illustrate how the changes extended or developed the use of technology for personal learning.