Pre-service teachers are increasingly engaging with generative AI (GenAI) tools such as ChatGPT. This mixed-methods study explores how Irish pre-service primary teachers use GenAI, alongside their perceptions of its opportunities, challenges, ethical implications, and professional development needs. The analysis considers variables including year of study and placement-related stress. Quantitative data were collected from 190 participants, complemented by qualitative interviews with four student teachers—one from each year group.

Findings reveal a clear developmental trajectory in GenAI adoption. Usage increases from Year 1 to Year 3. Patterns of use also shift: while first-year students primarily engage with GenAI for personal tasks, fourth-year students increasingly apply it to lesson planning and classroom resource creation. Initial scepticism and ethical concerns are most significant in Year 1 and diminish over time, while perceived opportunities peak in Year 3. The need for targeted professional development remains consistent across all years. All interviewees highlighted a strong demand for clearer institutional guidance. Notably, placement-related stress appears to influence GenAI use most strongly in Year 3, with students under higher stress levels reporting more frequent use. These findings underscore the urgent need for professional development and institutional policies to support the integration of GenAI in teacher education.

Vocational education and training (VET) systems across Europe face growing pressure to adapt to evolving labour market demands and rapid technological change. Despite reform efforts, many institutions still operate with fragmented curricula and limited opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration or applied learning.

This study explores how design thinking, agile methodologies and collaborative digital tools can enhance VET by supporting the co-design of Innovation Frameworks (IFs) in Portugal, Slovenia, and Spain, with guidance from Irish universities.

First, focus groups with 38 teachers and surveys with 100 teachers and 257 students from six VET schools identified key challenges such as low student motivation, gaps between curriculum and market needs, and difficulty integrating new technologies. Second, a train-the-trainer programme was introduced, enabling school teams to engage with agile and design thinking tools through experiential learning. This capacity-building phase ensured educators could apply these methodologies in their own contexts. Subsequently, cross-disciplinary teams co-designed school-specific IFs through workshops and training. Finally, five schools completed two design sprints. Cross-national interactions, lessons learned, and experiments supported schools to prepare for the final iteration.

This research demonstrates the potential of adaptive innovation processes to foster innovation, collaboration, learner engagement and resilience, offering a replicable model for real-world, practice-oriented learning.

Planning lessons has become an exercise of reflecting on what we are teaching, how we are engaging students in the learning process, and where the learning happens. Including technology in the mix can help making the what, how and where more effective and focused. For this, Kimmons et al. (2020) created the PICRAT (Passive/Interactive/Creative use by students; Replacing/Amplifying/Transforming traditional practice) model to aid teachers plan technologically rich lessons that will engage students in the learning process and facilitate the teaching and delivery of content through digital and online tools. This model can be used as a guide to evaluate the role of tools in the classroom and students’ engagement and interactions with them.

As part of my doctoral research, I am looking at how student teachers enrolled in a MA programme in language teacher education are using technology in their teaching practice. Following two workshops as an intervention where participants are presented with some online tools for language teaching, they plan and teach an online session as part of their teaching practice and submit the lesson plans for analysis, which will add some insights to the study. These lesson plans are then evaluated using the PICRAT matrix for technology integration.