Use of PBL Method in Teaching IT to Students from a Faculty of Education: A Case Study

Abstract

To be able to go in parallel with the development of IT we must apply it first to the educational community. The important players of two sites of this community - teachers and learners -- must be decked out with IT literacy as soon as possible; especially students at Colleges of Education are more important than others because today's students are future educators. In order to do this we must create new teaching and learning environments. Besides more of the learners today are face to face with questions such as Where there are more knowledge and how can I reach it?, How can I construct new knowledge structures?, How can I become more creative?. Teachers also ask themselves How can I teach more efficiently?, How can I motivate students to be more active during the lectures? and many similar questions. The answer for all these questions is Use IT!. Thanks to the magic power of IT, today it is not difficult to reach knowledge from almost everywhere and to transform it from one format to another. So, if we want to create new teaching and learning environments we have to teach students to use IT efficiently and flexibly. The roles and responsibilities of teachers and learners must change in order to create active learning environments. As Grabinger, Dunlap and Duffield (1997) state ........a learning environment that places students in the driver's seat of the learning process - involving them in the planning, controlling, and directing of learning activities and the application and assessment of learning processes and outcomes - is the essence of a REAL - a Rich Environment for Active Learning. At the government schools and universities in Turkey, technological facilities and man power are not enough to create flexible environments for active learning. If we can motivate students to learn through Problem Based Learning (PBL) method it will be more easy to create a REAL and to promote from conventional learning to active learning. This paper presents a case study of application of PBL method in order to create a REAL in a basic IT course given to second grade students at the Faculty of Education of Istanbul University. We discuss the problems encountered and the outcomes of the study in which totally 110 students from three different departments took part.