How Can Technology Make This Work? Preservice Teachers, Off-Campus Learning and Digital Portfolios

Utilising appropriate Information CommunicationTechnologies (ICT) as instructional tools in teacher education canbe a challenging yet worthwhile endeavour. This paper reports thedifficulties and benefits of a recent inter-university project requiringpreservice primary teachers to construct professional digitalportfolios using the support of ICT. Challenges with regard tocommunication and learning were numerous as 34 preserviceteachers (PSTs) from three universities in NSW (situated in countrytowns, and in Sydney) worked together as a collaborative learningcommunity. Meeting regularly face-to-face during the 12-monthprocess was not always possible and so ICT resources wereemployed to facilitate instruction and communication. An actionresearch methodology generated a data set of surveys, observationalfield notes, and student assessment artefacts. We share the findingsin this paper so that others may learn from our experiences in usingfree access software and commonplace hardware when constructingdigital portfolios with students who are some distance from campus.