Stimulating preservice teachers' beliefs about the benefits of everyday technology in their teaching.

摘要

Interest has been developing in the potential uses of everyday technologies, such as video games, cell phones, and social networking sites, for teaching and learning in K12 schools. This study examines three issues related to preservice secondary teachers' preferences for teaching with these everyday tools. The study begins by examining the disconnect between students' everyday technology use and the technology used in classroom instruction. Second, I explore the belief that everyday technology tools are important to student learning and that teachers need help understanding how to effectively use everyday technology tools in classroom instruction. I investigated the beliefs of 45 entering preservice teachers taking a 6-month educational technology course as part of a Masters and Certification program at a research university.;This was a qualitative study with a grounded theory approach, aiming to meet three objectives. First to understand if there was a connection between the technology tools preservice teachers used in their everyday lives and the technology tools they plan to integrate into their future classrooms. To explore this objective data was collected from the preservice teachers in the form of drawings and lists concerning their vision of technology tools inside and outside of education. The findings illuminated that the entering preservice teachers did not envision using students' everyday technology tools in their teaching. The second objective was to experiment with various teaching strategies in the technology education course to help the preservice teachers adopt everyday technology instruction for their future teaching. The third objective was to pinpoint how, when and why belief change did or did not occur in the preservice teachers. To explore the second and third objectives data was collected on the preservice teachers' reflecting in web blog journals. It became evident from the findings that 39 of the 45 students adopted everyday technology instruction. The preservice teachers fell into one of five adoption categories: early adoption, middle adoption, late adoption, interested adoption, or non-adoption. In the context of this study there did not seem to be a single factor that led to adoption. This study has implications for developing preservice education experiences that foster everyday technology instruction in preservice teachers.