Providing appropriate education to children unable to attend regular school is challenging. Some students with disabilities or other health impairments receive educational services in a variety of settings, including alternative schools, residential psychiatric placements, hospitals, and home placements for short and long periods of time. The teachers in these alternative settings, including hospital schools, coordinate with the students’ home schools to ensure continuity of learning. In Australia hospital schools are typically small schools situated in regional hospitals that cater for school age children and are staffed by teachers under the jurisdiction of the local Department of Education.

The educational progress and social and emotional wellbeing of hospitalized students, can suffer because of displacement from regular schools, friends, and families. Hospital schoolteachers can help these students using a range of educational delivery options and coordinating with the students’ regular schools to maintain their learning and reduce the isolation and anxiety that disrupted schooling may cause. Mobile technologies offer opportunities for transformative change in teaching and learning in schools (Owen 2015) and are particularly appropriate for hospital schools which require communication with parents, collaboration with teachers at the schools where students were enrolled, knowledge and skills for meeting complex and challenging needs of diverse student populations and locations in hospital.

Recognizing these trends and the need to provide teachers ongoing, just in–time technological and pedagogical support inspired an Australian regional hospital school to look towards mobile technology platforms. The project’s focus was developed in response to a series of objectives identified during strategic planning and conducted by school staff. To improve learning outcomes for their students and reduce the gap between the technology-rich learning environment of students’ regular schools and the hospital school, mobile technologies and relevant digital pedagogies were introduced. The integration of mobile technologies to support learning requires specialized professional development for teachers that focuses on exemplary pedagogies (Laurillard 2012). While such professional development is important for classroom teachers, it is even more crucial for hospital schoolteachers who support vulnerable children (Maor and Mitchem 2015).

This qualitative research examined professional development efforts supporting effective integration of mobile technologies in a hospital school setting. It sought to examine how well the model of coaching developed met the unique needs of the hospital school with a specific focus on the role of the coach in facilitating teacher and student learning. The following research questions were addressed:

• What are the main contextual challenges and teacher needs?
• What specific coaching practices support teachers’ individual professional learning needs for successfully implementing mobile technologies in hospital school settings?

Mobile learning has emerged from the broader field of e-learning (Oakley et al., 2013) as a preferred way for learning and communication. The adoption of devices such as iPads and tablets in education settings has resulted in the development of learning environments in which the device, as well as the learner, are mobile.

High quality PD exists, and much is known about its requisite features of effectiveness, including actively engaging teachers in learning (Pierson and Borthwick 2010), developing collaborative communities (Sindelar and Brownell 2001), providing expert support (Zorfass and Rivero 2005), focusing on interventions that are practical, meet specific needs, and are aligned with local contexts (McLesky and Waldron 2004). Within the context of social constructivism Mishra, Koehler and Zhao (2006), argued that purposefully created collaborative communities should involve individuals with a variety of expertise and expectations so that all members benefit from the arrangement. Many researchers conclude that for teachers to use and integrate technology meaningfully, teachers must be guided by appropriate theoretical frameworks (Koehler and Mishra 2009; Puentedura 2012) with individualized job-embedded coaching (Yendol-Hoppey and Dana 2010).

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