Editorial Overview

Abstract

The burgeoning growth of educational technologies available to educators seems to suggest that any new technologies will simply make education better. Yet immediate adoption of emerging technologies is not always successful, and might even be detrimental if the adoption is not purposeful and informed. The sudden availability of artificial intelligence reminds us that these potential tools for learning and creativity—like the internet and social media before it—can also be a source for plagiarism and misinformation if not utilized correctly. This issue of JETS focuses on articles that look critically at a variety of technologies. Sometimes the technologies enhance learning, and sometimes they don’t. Yet all of the articles provide important insights that can be used to guide educators’ selection and purposeful implementation of the technologies. Our first paper presents a framework for selecting educational technologies that support students’ development of critical thinking skills. Extending the Technological, Pedagogical and Content Knowledge (TPACK) model, this framework focuses on six critical thinking skills: Interpretation, analysis, evaluation, inference, explanation, and self-regulation. The framework is further explained with an example of how it can be applied to an actual classroom situation, using tools ranging from interactive whiteboards to ChatGPT. The next two papers look at the use of specific technologies and contexts. The first of these provides guidelines for using Twitter in a marine biology course. The next paper describes a game called FLIGBY, developed for an entrepreneurship course with a focus on innovation and creativity. Although the authors did not find a correlation between the score in the game and student performance on tests and projects, interviews with students revealed that the game got them to think more about their human interactions. The following two papers look at different pedagogical approaches. The first of these compares two approaches to teaching systematic instruction methods to preservice teachers. Although the researchers found no significant difference, both approaches appear to work. This paper is potentially useful to anyone who is training preservice teachers because of the detailed description of how this was implemented and the section on implications for practice. In the next paper, a large statistics course was offered in-person (with students in a large lecture hall) and online. No appreciable difference was found. The next paper provides an overview of Editorial