Towards Digital Skills for All Pre-service Teachers: Collecting Good Curricular Practices

Towards Digital Skills for All Pre-service Teachers: Collecting Good Curricular Practices

Abstract

The goal of this research full paper is to provide insight into most recent findings of interviews with faculty members teaching digital skills in an integrated and innovative way embedded into courses on subject didactics of a teacher education program. Pre-studies analyzing students' perspectives regarding the inclusion of digital competences in the teacher education program of a large Central-European university revealed that less than half of the students who were at an advanced stage in their studies felt sufficiently prepared to impart digital competences in their daily teaching. Given the importance of being digitally competent in the modern, digital era, the question arises, how digital competences can be sustainably included in the curriculum of a teacher education program. This paper analyzes interviews with five faculty members successfully teaching digital skills in concert with subject didactics of Geography in order to identify best practices for the integration of digital competences. The first author asked our Interview Partners to provide insight into the content they mediated, the integration of digital competences and tools in their courses, how their teaching could be further improved, and what challenges they encounter. Eventually, we looked for best practices and collected instructors' thoughts on improvements on a curricular level and examples of transferring the good practices to other subjects, such that future students could benefit from a better integration of digital competences. For this paper, we analyzed the data with a mixture of narrative analysis and thematic analysis. Improving the mediating of digital skills and competences in a wider range of subjects at the university level should eventually help students, and ultimately their students, to implement digital know-how such as modern teaching tools into their courses, making teaching more effective and computational thinking as well as related fields of computing more accessible to academic as well as secondary and younger students. The research so far has shown promising results considering examples of tools that can be used on a broad spectrum of subjects and lead to a factor of learned new digital competences if used properly. On the other hand, lecturers also warned about relying too much on technology in specific tasks such as orientation on a map or analyzing statistical data. We conclude that combining existing approaches with new, more modern didactics can be the key to transferring the competencies required for our students' future.

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Authors
  • Ambros, Roland
  • Dolezal, Dominik
  • Motschnig, Renate
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Shortfacts
Category
Paper in Conference Proceedings or in Workshop Proceedings (Paper)
Event Title
2023 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE)
Divisions
Education, Didactics and Entertainment Computing
Subjects
Ausbildung, Beruf, Organisationen
Angewandte Informatik
Informatik in Beziehung zu Mensch und Gesellschaft
Event Location
College Station, TX, USA
Event Type
Conference
Event Dates
18-21 October 2023
Page Range
01-09
Date
October 2023
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