Section archive - ICT & Teaching

Preparing the next generation of preschool teachers who can integrate and make use of ICT to capitalise on and develop young children’s digital competences remains a challenging goal for teacher education programmes (TEP). Given the current gaps in the literature, this study aims to expand and deepen our understanding of the extent to which early childhood pre-service teachers encounter ICT during their training and how they are prepared to use digital technologies in their future practices. The empirical data was generated through a focus group study with pre-service teachers and interview with their teacher educators at an institution of higher education in Sweden. The findings of the study suggest that pre-service teachers feel they have not been adequately prepared to integrate ICT into their future educational practices in preschool. Teacher educators, however, demonstrated a completely different perspective, highlighting a variety of initiatives that they were implementing to prepare the next generation of preschool teachers to use digital technologies. It will discuss why pre-service teachers, unlike teacher educators, feel they are not being adequately prepared to use digital technologies in early childhood education. The study also provides a detailed account of the varied procedures involved in preparing pre-service teachers’ digital competences and makes recommendations to teacher educators on how to enhance future preschool teachers’ Technologica-lPedagogical-Content-Knowledge (TPACK).

As a teacher educator, the author sought to understand how to cultivate care ethics in her online teaching over a three-year period. Through surveys, student work, interviews, her course materials and teaching journal, and video-ed synchronous class sessions with seven cohorts of teacher candidates, the lenses of care ethics revealed particular challenges and possibilities for care with authentic modeling through story, practice and continuity, dialogue, and addressing power and confirmation in assessment. The self-study process helped her uncover her own assumptions to carve out better ways to cultivate caring relationships in the distanced and disembodied online environment.

Teacher professional development (TPD) programs are increasingly using video recordings of teaching practice to develop teacher capacity and foster student learning. However, consensus has yet to be reached about how to utilize video recordings in TPD for physical education (PE) teachers. The authors used semi-structured interviews and evaluations of PE teachers’ written reflective statements to investigate how they reacted as they engaged with different video material and external facilitators during a TPD program. Teachers believed video-based reflection on their own teaching, rather than viewing others’ practice, was the most useful, even though both forms of analysis produced a similar depth of reflection. PE teachers also benefited from dialogue with external facilitators during the TPD program. These results highlight the importance of researchers, teachers, and facilitators delivering and participating in TPD collaboratively and focusing on strategies that may increase the depth of teacher reflection on their own practices, which is considered a first step toward changing classroom practice and improving student outcomes.

With a plethora of technology available to support teaching and learning, preservice teachers are expected to become well-versed in technology literacy and competencies through their teacher education programs. This study examined preservice teachers’ perceptions of technology competencies, based on newly issued International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) Standards for Educators. A mixed-methods design was used to collect data at one of the national universities of education in South Korea. The preservice teachers viewed their current technology education courses as deficient: neither tailored to their technology competency levels, nor strategically aligned with each other. This study suggested that teacher education curricula should be redesigned to offer more and better opportunities for teachers to improve teaching technology skills that can be readily applied to classrooms.