Using digital technology in the classroom adds new professional tasks for (student) teachers

ABSTRACT

This article discusses a study conducted among final-year undergraduate students preparing to become primary school teachers. These students participated in an eight-week module on digital technology, working in pairs to create, test and analyse pedagogical scenarios using and not using digital tablets. The study aimed to address two main questions: (1) How do the views of pre-service teachers change as a result of a technology instruction programme? (2) What new professional tasks emerge when they use digital technologies in their internship teaching practices? Various data sources were collected and analysed. The findings revealed that none of the pre-service teachers held entirely negative views on digital technologies after the module. They became more comfortable using them in their classrooms, especially for teaching oral language, while for mathematics they found them less useful. Furthermore, the results showed that eight new professional tasks appeared when teaching with digital technologies.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher training
• teachers’ representations of technology
• professional tasks
• teaching with technology
• digital technology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Students who already have a kindergarten teacher’s diploma, and do an additional year to obtain a bachelor’s degree in primary education.

2. Each pre-service teacher was assigned a code, in order to anonymise the data.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stéphane Colognesi

Stéphane Colognesi is professor at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences of the University of Louvain, Belgium. His research interest focuses on learning and instruction in both primary and secondary school as well as in higher education. More specifically, Colognesi’s research concentrates on Learning and Instruction (writing and oral), teacher education and support for teachers. He teaches educational science, pedagogy and language didactics to master’s and doctoral students.

Vanessa Hanin

Vanessa Hanin obtained a PhD degree in Psychological and Educational Sciences from the Universite catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain) in 2018. She is now a professor in the Department of Sciences of Education at UCLouvain. Her research interests focus on how to promote the integrated mastery of both cognitive, metacognitive, emotional and motivational processes in upper elementary students in the context of mathematical problem-solving. She lectures in educational sciences, psychology and didactics of mathematics to graduate and undergraduate students.