Including Educational science practices in teaching education
Digital applications for lesson observations
Abstract
Finnish teacher education is praised for its research-based approach. However, educational research practices are not very common in teacher education. We introduce simple, affordable HTML5-based application (app) software to implement an authentic video research activity in teaching practice. With the observation tool, it is easy to code the activities in the classroom. The observation tool app generates a timeline of the lesson outline from the predefined observation protocol. We introduce the observation tool through two cases: first, how the tool is used in educational research and, second, how these authentic education research practices were implemented in science teacher education. We conclude that the generated timeline of a lesson can be used to facilitate reflective discussions in teaching practice. The app is licenced under Creative Commons 4 and is available through GitHub (https://github.com/MTurkkila/LOBS).
