Dr Jim Fanning, Senior Education Officer from Education Scotland, has been developing information for educators to raise an awareness and understanding of AI use in education. Here he considers some of the risks and benefits of using AI driven applications to support teaching and learning.

Emma Whewell shares the findings of Alastair Snook’s study on primary teachers’ use of educational technology, and the opportunities and challenges it presented during the pandemic. The shift to alternative methods of instruction using digital technology has been a learning process for digital native teachers and digital immigrant teachers alike.

Emma Goto explores how the Philosophy for Children (P4C) pedagogical approach could be used in digital literacy and e-safety lessons.

This qualitative research study from the US explores the experiences of teachers in the spring semester of 2020 as they remotely instructed their students owing to COVID-19 campus closures. Analysis revealed teachers’ concerns for their students and their learning, the barriers presented owing to the disconnect between them and their students, and how their competencies changed as their time with remote instruction increased.

Dr Julia Sargent from the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University introduces her recent TPEA journal article on students’ perceptions of democratic assessment practices through video narratives.

Computing teacher Matthew Chermside considers how we can promote and scaffold talk for learning in the computer science classroom.

On 3rd November Dr Elizabeth Hidson gave a talk at the Digital Technologies for Education Special Interest Group at the University of Northampton. Her presentation focused on in-service ICT teachers faced with the 2014 English National Curriculum shift that required the teaching of Computer Science and how their pedagogical knowledge was enhanced through shared lesson resources and professional communities of practice.

Dr Elias Said-Hung from the International University of La Rioja introduces a research project involving the development of a social media toolkit for use in higher education.

This Finnish study reports a practical experiment involving young pupils, their teachers and university students, named the Media Agent project. The purpose of the project was for the university students to teach the schoolchildren new Information and Communication Technology (ICT) skills, which they then would teach to other pupils and teachers at their own schools.