Section archive - ICT & Teaching

Informed by the person–object theory of interest, this study deployed a mixed-method concurrent triangulation design and investigated the impact of major/specialization, gender, and module design on preservice teachers' interest in teaching computational thinking. The study was conducted in a flipped computational thinking module hosted in three sections of educational technology courses at two U.S. institutions. Results from the quantitative analysis showed that preservice teachers who did both Scratch coding and physical computing practices had a higher level of interest than their peers who only did the Scratch coding only. The qualitative analysis found evidence that preservice teachers' interest differed by their gender and major/specialization statuses. At the end, the authors provided suggestions for future research and practice for teaching computational thinking in teacher education.

The main objective of the research described here was to learn how young learners self-evaluate their digital competence. A non-experimental and descriptive quantitative methodology was employed, an electronic survey being used to collect the data. Among the main results, the authors highlight that these learners self-evaluate their attitude towards Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) as favourable, their handling of them as moderate and their knowledge of them as scarce. It became clear that they do not have a level of digital competence suitable for being called ‘digital natives’, nor sufficient ability to use ICT in their academic life or in their professional future.

This article reports the perceived learning of a group of Chinese teacher candidates who audited an ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) literacy course while participating in an exchange programme between Southwest University in China and the University of Windsor in Canada. Data were collected through 1) reflective notes written by visiting students and 2) semi-structured interviews conducted with them towards the end of their visit. The majority of participants stated that the learning experience helped them to realise the important role theory plays in the learning of ICT and to seek ideas of how to creatively integrate ICT in their future classrooms. Participants with limited ICT knowledge and skills reported that by being exposed to various functions of frequently used programmes and many free software programmes, they felt more confident in using ICT in their own teaching. Furthermore, those with strong ICT backgrounds found that the course helped them to understand the relationship among ICT, society, and pedagogy. The teacher candidates’ perceived learning included aspects of culture and pedagogy in addition to ICT knowledge and skills. Coming to know in ways like this is critically important to international partnerships and foundational to reciprocal learning where each learns from the other.

In an initiative to improve learning experiences and outcomes for students, the leaders of a school located in a hospital in Australia implemented a new digital strategy with mobile technologies and relevant digital pedagogies. This study examines the outcomes of a professional development program introduced to effect transformational change by enabling integrated use of mobile technologies in the hospital school. The study examines teachers’ views following completion of this customized professional development program, using a mixed methods investigation situated within the unique learning environment of the hospital school. A key finding is that identifying and addressing teacher needs through customized professional development, supported with individualized coaching, can increase the participating teachers’ technological pedagogical knowledge to enable the improved use of mobile technology in a hospital school setting. Additionally, hospital school teachers responded to opportunities to collaborate as a professional learning community to implement, support, and enhance mobile learning for hospitalized students. The findings from this study have significant implications for leaders in all schools and systems embarking on similar initiatives to transform pedagogical practices through professional development supporting mobile technology integration in a digital world.