Preparation versus practice: How do teacher education programs and practicing teachers align in their use of technology to support teaching and learning?

Improving Understanding of Pre-Service Teacher Experience with Technology Integration

“…The Revised Bloom's Taxonomy is broken into two dimensions: the knowledge dimension and the cognitive process dimension. Prior research into teacher education and technology integration has separately reported both knowledge and cognitive process information about the perceptions of teacher education students [1,2,18]. To make sense of the data presented in this study, we have separated the Revised Bloom's Taxonomy into three sections each containing both cognitive and knowledge information processes.…”

“…All teacher education students in the United States are required to take a basic technology course [10] however, pre-service teachers generally do not practice integrating technology within their methods classes [2,11]. In a 2006 study of pre-service teachers and their learning experiences in an educational technology class, Brown and Warschauer found that most participants did not feel adequately prepared to enter a classroom and teach in a technologically rich environment.…”

“…It has been well established that technology, like any other classroom advancement, is not a panacea for improving instruction [1,2]. Within the classroom, an instructor must be able to leverage not only technical knowledge, but also content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge in order to consistently create effective and efficient lessons [3].…”

“…Similarly, other studies [12,13] found that these required technology classes tended to focus on technology skills and not integration. This lack of emphasis on technology integration is made worse when many traditional teacher education programs also do not adequately model it in methods classes [2,12,13].…”

Using iPads as the Digital Tool to Integrate Authentic Assignments into a Teacher Preparation Program

“…According to Zhao (2003) "…for teachers to use technology, they need to develop knowledge that enables them to transfer technological potentials into solutions to pedagogical problems" (p. 4). The alignment between the technology topics presented to the teacher candidates and those in use in the classroom to support teaching and learning should contribute to reducing the aforementioned knowledge gap (Ottenbreit-Leftwich et al, 2012).…”