Who, When and How?

This past week, on March 25, the OLE unit conducted a webinar on the topic of:

Preparing future teachers for internet-aided
learning – Who, When, and How?

In this session (in Hebrew) three teacher educators at three different teacher colleges in Israel gave short presentations on their experience in teaching with ICT.

Each of the three described how she has worked not only with student teachers, but with other faculty members at her college to help their student teachers integrate ICT into their work, and to feel both that they are capable of using these technologies and that they have an important role to play in teaching.

Nitsa Waldman opened her part of the session with some important background information. Since 2004 teachers colleges have been required to teach the basics of computer use as well as the ways ICT can be integrated into the teaching of specific disciplines. What’s more, future teachers are expected to be exposed to at least 120 hours of computer use, including numerous hours in “distance learning” courses.

This background information gave perspective on the major question that the webinar attempted to deal with: Who is going to help the future teacher acquire the knowledge necessary to use ICT in the classroom in a worthwhile and educational why?

Waldman noted the various possibilities:

• The pedagogic coach
• The “computer” teacher
• The teachers in each discipline
• The school teacher by whom the student teacher is acquiring experience
• Or perhaps all of these together

Waldman presented a chart representing the Koheler/Mishra Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge model (http://www.tpck.org):

She demonstrated a model for integrating the various forces involved in educating teachers in order to achieve the desired goal - a new teacher who is capable of using ICT in his or her teaching.

Waldman emphasized that previous research has shown that neither pre-service teachers, nor faculty, perceived themselves as prepared to teach with computers. In her part of the webinar, Nicole Eitan reported on her experience at Achva College. In the model that Eitan presented, the student teacher and the pedagogic coach represented two corners of a triangle, while the specialist in ICT completed the third corner.

Olzhan Goldstein reviewed research she conducted. She studied a course offered to second year students in Special Education. In this course the students learned to use both existing online resources, and to prepare digital resources by themselves, and also how to use these within the context of their work with pupils. Goldstein examined whether the students’ attitudes toward digital resources changed as a result of the course. To put things perhaps much too simply, she found that although at the beginning of their studies the student teachers had negative attitudes toward ICT, later on, particularly because their pupils were in favor of these tools, their attitudes changed.

The participants in this session weren’t passive. Many of them were also experienced ICT teachers, and in the discussion after the presentations a number of these participants reported on their own experience. In this sense, though the focus was on the presentations of the three “invited” speakers, the session definitely took on a tenor of a seminar in which all participants had something to contribute, and everyone felt they had learned something.

A blog's continuing silence

If there are any followers to this blog, its extended silence (two full months) should be a sign that it hasn’t yet succeeded in finding its voice. The Online Learning Environments unit of the Mofet Institute has been very active during these past two months. It has conducted numerous Webinars on a wide variety of topics, in addition to workshops designed to provide teacher educators with digital tools they can incorporate into their instruction. But the blog has been silent.

The blog was envisioned as a tool to bring information about various OLE-initiated activities to English speaking educators. We in Israel have learned a great deal from the English language research we read. In turn, we’re convinced that our experience here as well can be instrumental in furthering the topic of ICT integration in teacher education. Of course presenting this information to the world requires translation, but that’s perhaps the easy part.

When we report here – primarily on our Webinars – our objective isn’t only to advertise ourselves. We want to share our experience, to contribute our own experience to a growing, worldwide, repository. Until now, however, we haven’t found the proper balance between sharing our insights from various sessions (and in that way also hopefully initiating discussion) and simply reporting on past (and sometimes future) activities.

We’re still trying. And we’re hopeful that we’ll succeed, and that readers will find this forum useful.