Dreaming of Constructivist Technology Integration Strategies in Future Teacher Students

Based on previous experiences in preparing future teachers for technology integration (Reuter & Busana, 2017), and based on the recommendations from Kolb’s (2017) Triple E framework about effective uses of ICT in education, we have adapted the Educational Technology course in our Initial Teacher Training. Over the years, we have indeed observed that, when given the choice of the type of technology integration strategies, many students designed ICT-based learning and teaching scenarios that implemented a rather teacher-centred teaching model (Roblyer & Doering, 2013). These scenarios were often far from innovative nor did they implement the disruptive potential of ICT in education (Christensen, Horn & Johnson, 2008). In the winter semester 2018-2019 we thus decided to ask our students to design and develop constructivist technology integration scenarios. We assessed the success of this adaptation with the help of our own observations, the semester reports produced by our students and their answers to an end-of-semester course evaluation. In general, we saw that students were able to design rather attractive constructivist learning activities. We also observed that our students were quite surprised that such activities do not require complicated and expensive tools, but that they can be implemented with standard productivity tools.