Preparing Pre-service Primary Teachers to Teach with Technology: A Case of England

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate pre-service primary teachers’ perspectives on their technology training sessions throughout the teacher training year and its effects on shaping their future lessons. This one-year training degree in England is called as the Postgraduate Certificate in Education or the PGCE in short. Pre-service teachers are asked to attend up to 60 credits at the master’s level in order to complete the requirements of the degree. The participants of the current study were six pre-service primary teachers attending the PGCE course at a university in England. The data were collected through semi-structured interviews. All of the participants took part in forty-five minutes to hour-long one-to-one interviews in one of the classes at the university. Thematic analysis was conducted to analyze the data. The findings indicated that pre-service teachers were willing to integrate technology into their future lessons although they do not feel confident about the applications of different teaching approaches when they use technology. They mostly considered technology as a hook at the beginning of the lessons, listed various technological sources and explained how they plan to integrate these into their future lessons.