Pre-service teacher reflections, video-conference and WebCT: An exploratory case study

Introduction. The development of video-conference and WebCT technology offers new possibilities for the education of pre-service teachers; opportunities that are only just beginning to be touched on. In this exploratory article, we investigate the opportunities for reflection that technology afforded three pre-service teachers in Canada as they a taught five elementary mathematics lessons to a remote school from their faculty of education. Method. Three pre-service teachers taught a series of mathematics lessons in a remote school via video-conference technology. Between lessons the recordings were reviewed by the pre-service teachers who subsequently engaged in WebCT discussions amongst themselves and their instructor (the third author). These commentaries were analysed in terms of the pre-service teachers. level of reflectivity, as either, commonsense thinkers. or, alert novices.. From this initial analysis, we then investigated three areas which the data suggests are important in assisting pre-service teachers to improve their capacities for reflection. Results. These three areas are: the biography of the pre-service teacher; the provision of content for pre-service teachers. reflections, and; the capacity of pre-service teachers to access the reflective opportunities afforded by the technologies. Conclusions. Based on our work, we believe that the increasing interest in utilizing video-conferencing technologies for pre-service teacher education calls for an understanding of these issues as a means for increasing the efficacy of that utilization.