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The chapter offers a case-study grounded in a professional development program for middle- and high-school teachers of history and/or social studies. The featured program supported American history teachers integrating the study of Picturing America images into academic subjects. Employing a dynamic Seattle-area academic and teaching partnership with the Seattle Art Museum, the Goodlad Institute for Educational Renewal, and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the project elaborated on Picturing America’s democracy theme. This theme, combined with visual thinking methods of exploring artworks, helped teacher link Picturing America’s masterpieces to their history curriculum, content standards, and individual responsibilities to promote informed civic participation. The program made innovative use of the Picturing America images to explore such historical concepts as freedom, equality, and inclusion. The purpose of the initiative was to enhance teaching innovation and curriculum and to help participants become influential teacher-leaders who can advocate for greater curricular emphasis on the combination of art and civic concepts. A signature feature of this effort was the focus on dissent as a lens through which to view key curricular concepts such as liberty, community, and informed citizenship.

The United Nations (UN) adopted Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs); agenda 2030 focuses on Climate Action (goal 13), targeting climate adaptability, as well as resilience, awareness and improving policy mechanisms on climate change. In order to enhance climate adaptability, climate-smart agricultural practices (CSAP) is a necessary step. CSAP is a sustainable agriculture approach with a strong focus on climate dimensions. The three pillars of climate-smart agriculture (CSA) are ‘Adaptation’: adapting to climate change; ‘Resilience’: building resilience against it and ‘Remove’: reducing carbon emissions. The new world economy uses Industry 4.0 technologies for sustainable advancement, including blockchain technology, big data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), augmented and virtual reality, industrial Internet of Things (IoT) and services. Hence, technology plays a significant role in climate sustainable agriculture practices. This chapter shall consider three technologies consisting of IoT, AI and blockchain technology which contribute to CSAP in pre-harvesting (monitoring climate as well as fertility status, soil testing, etc.), harvesting (tilling, fertilisation, seed operations, etc.) and post-harvesting (predicting weather factors, seed varieties, etc.) periods of agriculture. All these three technologies work like the human nervous system; IoT helps in converting various information regarding demography, climate change, local agricultural needs, etc. into world data; AI works like a brain in combination with IoT, helps predict the use of climate-smart technology and blockchain, the memory part of the nervous system which deals with supply-side and ensures traceability as well as transparency for consumers as well as farmers. Hence, this chapter shall contribute to the importance of these three technologies in adopting CSAP in three stages of agriculture.

This essay explores an instructional application of Wikipedia within the context of an undergraduate capstone course in historical studies, entitled “Revisiting the Weather Underground.” I wanted student research writing to find a wider audience than the classroom, so devised an assignment which called upon students in this senior seminar to research, write, and publish (via Wikipedia) biographies of individuals associated with this antiwar, anti-imperialist organization. Course membership included both traditional-aged college students and returning students. None had prior experience with social history, biography, publishing, or writing/editing on Wikipedia. Despite the fact that all participants (and I include myself here) had a steep learning curve when it came to the technology necessary to address a reading public through Wikipedia, the students rose to the challenge. The use of Wikipedia as venue shaped the manner in which students thought about their biographical subjects (some of whom could conceivably – and do, in fact – read and respond to the biographies), their subject matter (the Weather Underground), their audience (which included Wikipedia readers and editors internationally), their responsibilities as researchers to be accountable for their characterizations of others’ life stories, their accountability in sourcing information, and their sense of authorship (which all needed to learn to share with strangers encountered through Wikipedia). In reflecting on the assignment, students valued the experience as authentic scholarly communication and lasting historical learning. The featured assignment demanded close partnerships among students, faculty, librarians, educational technologists, and Wikipedia editors/administrators, and served also to dramatize the perils and possibilities of shared inquiry.

This chapter presents innovative approaches to active learning that were introduced into the teaching of preservice teachers at the Faculty of Education of University of West Bohemia, Pilsen, in the Czech Republic. Over the last three years, the Technology-Enhanced Learning course has seen substantial innovations in both the content and use of teaching strategies designed to prepare the students for their professional lives. The whole update of the course was implemented using the results of action research – all individual changes were rigorously tracked and analyzed. The state of the art in the active learning domain in education of preservice teachers is presented in this chapter.

There is a description of the procedure to update the course, based on the reflections of teachers and feedback from students, gathered during action research. Detailed evaluations of particular methods of active learning that have been proven in teaching are provided.

Besides practical activities with tablets and smartphones, during which students familiarize themselves with various types of applications and reflect on their use in teaching, the course was extended by the use of practical aids for the efficient inclusion of mobile technologies for teaching – the Czech version of Allan Carrington’s Padagogy Wheel. This aid is derived from the revised Bloom’s taxonomy and SAMR model and helps the systematic reflection of preservice teachers when preparing for technology-enhanced teaching.

A significant part of the teaching consists of cooperative projects between preservice teachers and pupils of elementary schools – for example, the preservice teachers help elementary school pupils discover possibilities of virtual reality during Google Cardboard activities, or preservice teachers in teams with elementary school pupils create digital stories together on the topic of Internet safety.

The innovative approach to active teaching in the Technology-Enhanced Learning course is apparent even during the exam. In the course of the exam, students process, present, and defend a lesson plan for the implementation of an activity using digital technologies.

Throughout the learning, as well as at the end, preservice teachers are encouraged to reflect on the teaching in the Technology-Enhanced Learning subject.