Week 27 - The Broader Professional Context

Integrating Technology into Teacher Education

In order to prepare our children for the technology driven world, our teachers need to be tech savvy.  With the world at our fingertips, via the internet, teachers are no longer the keepers of all knowledge, dispensing information according to their course plan, with ultimate control over who learns what when.  

In this changing world, teachers need to be mentors to their students, guiding, facilitating, problem solving with the children, and giving them the freedom to learn in a student centred way.  With the increasing availability of digital tools, students are more able to learn about the things that interest and engage them, with the autonomy to choose when and where their learning happens, and the ability to collaborate with others and create their own knowledge.  This provides students with deeper learning opportunities.

So, how does this happen?  How do the teachers acquire the knowledge, skills and confidence to make this happen, to teach our children the skills necessary for the 21st Century?    Teachers need education in this area, just as students do.  The early adopters are keen to just get in there, try things out, and learn by doing it, but many do not have the confidence to do this, and therefore, effective professional development, both for pre-service and practicing teachers, is key.  

As outlined in the NMC Horizon Report (2015), the Norwegian SMILE project found that “the level of a teacher’s digital competence correlates directly with students’ learning outcomes when technology is used”.  We’ve got to get it right.

Blended learning, “the integration of technology into teaching and learning” (Parsons, 2011,  p.xiv) is now common practice within tertiary institutions and is the standard mode of delivery for teacher education in New Zealand.  Trainee teachers, therefore, gain an understanding of the value of technology in education through their own learning.  But how do they transfer this to their own classrooms, and how do they discover the best tools to use, amongst the overwhelmingly enormous selection available?  Part of the solution is through education along the lines of our Mind Lab learning.  Not only have we had the privilege of checking out the best digital tools, gaining an appreciation of how powerful they can be in giving our children a rich education, but we have also come to understand that these technology skills go hand in hand with the nurturing of 21st century skills and our own leadership and reflective practice, in preparing our students for the world ahead.

I am most interested in this issue, because next year I intend to embark on the journey to become a teacher myself.  As a librarian, I am an educator, but the time has come for me to take the leap into becoming a teacher. I know that because of my learning through the Mind Lab,  I will have something of a headstart in my teacher education. What I would truly like to see is the type of material that we have learnt this year being part of the education of all teachers, whether pre-service or practicing.  This can only be of benefit to our students.

References

Parsons, D. (2011). Foreword. In A. Kitchenham (Ed.) Models for Interdisciplinary Mobile Learning: Delivering Information to Students. Hershey, PA: IGI Global.

Johnson, L., Adams Becker, S., Estrada, V., & Freeman, A. (2015). The NMC Horizon Report: 2015 Museum Edition. New Media Consortium. 6101 West Courtyard Drive Building One Suite 100, Austin, TX 78730.  Retrieved from http://cdn.nmc.org/media/2015-nmc-horizon-report-k12-EN.pdf