New pathways in teacher education – Learning (to teach) with digital media

Keynote 15 June 2018

Franziska Baier, Goethe University Frankfurt 

The integration of courses on teaching with digital media into formal teacher education is a crucial aspect of future teacher education. Digital media play a substantial role across many professions and are also very likely to substitute (or complement) traditional media in schools in the long run. Thus, future teachers need to be able to foster their students’ ICT-skills and prepare them for their future occupations. Furthermore, they need to be able to provide high-quality instruction by employing digital media in their teaching. Consequently, teachers need to hold specific knowledge about educational technologies and about how they can be employed efficiently in everyday classroom instruction. For teacher education, this means that offering future teachers learning opportunities with and about digital media and developing instruments that can be used to monitor the development of this knowledge is highly relevant. In my research, I address these topics. I present results from two studies in which I investigated the implementation and effectiveness of learning opportunities that integrate learning about and/or with digital media into formal teacher education. Furthermore, I present a newly developed instrument to measure pre-service teachers’ knowledge about teaching effectively with digital media (Technological Pedagogical Knowledge).