The state of affairs of teacher education with respect to information and communications technology

Abstract

If the Internet is an information superhighway, then teachers just might be the road-kill on the asphalt of the information superhighway. Possibly, for the first time in history, students are more adept at using the tools necessary for acquiring and transmitting knowledge than are their teachers. Children everywhere are creating their own virtual communities through the use of new technologies. They make use of chat facilities (MSN®, ICQ® etc.) to stay synchronously in touch with both old and new friends and email and short message services to stay in touch with them asynchronously. They take part in discussion groups, navigate through virtual worlds and assimilate new hardware and software as if it were second nature. In many ways they are light years ahead of their parents and teachers with respect to the possibilities of information and communications technology (ICT). As a result students are getting bored and frustrated and teachers are getting frustrated and distraught. To try to remedy this, the Inspectorate of Education of the Netherlands commissioned the Educational Technology Expertise Centre of the Open University of the Netherlands to lead an international study (quick-scan) on good/best practice with respect to the integration of ICT into the mental and physical toolbox of the aspirant teacher and to try to draw from this preliminary curricular benchmarks for teachers' colleges in the Netherlands. The quick-scan was carried out by a network of teacher training and ICT experts throughout the world. This special issue shows the reader the results of this quick-scan in terms of good practice and benchmarks for calibration and/or modelling of teacher training in ICT along with a number of pedagogical and policy repercussions of their adoption