Ollipekka Kangas & Marjaana Veermans, OPPI
Finnish student teachers’ views on educational technology and social media

Recent research has shown the importance of appropriate role models for using educational technology as a natural part of learning environment. It has also been acknowledged that in the internships the role models play even more crucial role, since they can show how educational technology is implemented in classrooms in practice. In the line the earlier findings we wanted to explore Finnish student teachers’ use of technology, pedagogical use, their self-evaluated skills, and what kind of support is needed for using technology. The participants were over 300 teacher education students, and the data consisted of three cohorts. The questionnaire used for data gathering had 56 items. Additionally, in 2012-2014 there were three open-ended questions an in 2013 special inquiry about social media use. The overall results showed that even though the student teachers use ICT during their leisure time, they don’t use it a similar way during their study time, and they don’t know how to integrate ICT in their teaching. This may be due to fact that the students do not have enough of opportunities to use ICT in their studies and during the internship.  By adding the open ended-questions about social media to our questionnaire we hoped to get depth to the data and wider angle towards of ICT use.

Keywords: teacher education, teacher students, educational technology, questionnaire, longitudinal, social media

Full poster link: posteri_Kangas_2014