Section archive - ICT & Teaching

This study focused on “digital natives” as preservice teachers to examine their beliefs, attitudes, and technology experiences and expertise. The study also focused on these preservice teachers to identify the strengths and weaknesses in their technology knowledge and skills, and explore what technology preparation was needed to prepare them to integrate technology in their future classrooms. The findings suggest that, growing up with technology, digital natives as preservice teachers are savvy with basic technologies and social-communication technologies. However, their technology proficiency is limited by both the narrow scope and the lack of depth of their technology activities.

This paper provides examples from teacher education materials that were developed using an approach that integrally develops teachers' understandings of content, technology, and pedagogy to prepare them to teach data analysis and probability topics using specific technology tools. The authors conclude that mathematics teachers need to know how to capitalize on the power of technology to create lessons that assist students in developing understandings of mathematics.

This interpretive case study investigates an attempt to add an online component—the On-line Literacy Project—to a successful face-to-face professional development community. Six members of the Literacy Project, which was carried out in the school board of a western Canadian city., participated in the study. Analysis of data showed that although participants acknowledged the potential of the Online Literacy Project the concept was poorly understood, received little support, and was not deemed relevant for a number of reasons, many of which are reported in the information and communication technology literature.

This trend study was designed to investigate a development of teachers' concerns about technology integration in the curriculum. The study was conducted by repeated cross-sectional studies, applying the same research instrument to different samples of subjects at different points, over a period of four years during 2004-2007. 275 in-service teachers participated in the study.The study found patterns of concern typical for teachers at different levels of their professional development as well as distinct and stable differences between technology user sub-groups over four years.