Editorial. Teacher education for effective technology integration

About a decade ago, several researchers used Shulman’s (1986) framework about Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) – a body of knowledge that constitutes a special amalgam of content, pedagogy, learn- ers, and context – as a theoretical basis for developing TPCK or TPACK: a framework for guiding teach- ers’ cognition about technology integration in teaching and learning (Angeli, Valanides, & Christodoulou, 2016). Different models of TPCK/TPACK are proposed in the literature, each with a different focus (on practice, instructional design, context, etc.) and with a different theoretical interpretation about the nature and development of the knowledge that teachers need to have to be able to teach with technology (e.g., Angeli & Valanides, 2005, 2009, 2013; Koehler & Mishra, 2008; Niess, 2005). The two dominant TPCK/ TPACK models in the literature are the integrative model and the transformative model. The integrative model is more closely associated with the term TPACK, and was proposed by Koehler and Mishra (2008). It conceptualizes TPCK as an integrative body of knowledge that is created on the spot by the mere inter- sections between different bodies of knowledge, such as content and pedagogy, content and technology, and pedagogy and technology. The transformative model was proposed by Angeli and Valanides (2005) and, unlike the integrative model, it conceptualizes TPCK as a unique body of knowledge that needs to be ex- plicitly taught by teacher educators. In the transformative model, content, pedagogy, learners, technology, and context are regarded as significant individual contributors to the development of TPCK. While the integrative and transformative models view TPCK as an extension of Shulman’s (1986) PCK, the two models are based on different epistemological stances regarding the nature of TPCK. TPACK is represented in terms of three intersecting circles, one for each distinct knowledge base, namely content, pedagogy and technology (Koehler & Mishra, 2008), while its subcomponents, i.e., technological con- tent knowledge (TCK), technological pedagogical knowledge (TPK) and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), are also distinctly examined. So far, empirical findings from this line of research are rather discour- aging, because it has proven too difficult to define the boundaries of the different TPACK sub-components (Graham, 2011). Angeli and Valanides’ framework of TPCK is conceptualized in terms of five distinct knowledge bas- es, namely content k