Preparing Future Teachers for Strategic Uses of Educational Technology: A Project-Based Approach

Given (1) the need for teachers who are willing and able to design, implement and reflect meaningful and successful educational technology practices in schools and (2) the current rarity of strategic uses of ICT in education in Luxembourgish schools, the self-declared lack of competencies and the low confidence of teachers when it comes to teaching with ICT (Reuter, Busana & Linckels, 2016), we have designed, implemented and tested a project-based approach to the development of practice- oriented TPACK in pre-service teachers. Future teacher students are instructed to define an educational problem they want to solve, to explore existing pedagogical and technological solutions and to design an original solution that involves the strategic use of ICT (theoretically grounded and practically meaningful). They then have to implement the designed learning & teaching scenario in a classroom, to document the teaching & learning processes, to analyse, evaluate and to critically reflect them. Finally, they are required to write a structured report about their project and to present it to their peers and to interested teachers from schools. Overall, we observe that while most students become able to design and implement relatively meaningful educational technology practices, they still tend to feel that they are not ready to teach with technology in a more general sense, because their work was focused on one or two tools and does not give them access to a broader range of meaningful ICT-enriched teaching scenarios for their later professional career.