Teacher education and ICT integration: Jozef Colpaert

Reassuring lies versus inconvenient truths.

One of the major challenges in teacher education is to convince pre-service teachers, our students, that they should (become able to) determine for themselves which technologies to use, when, where, how and why. Preferably in a methodological and justifiable way. This provocative statement stems from two conflicting phenomena. On the one hand, technology is evolving so quickly that it does not make sense to build a course around specific systems or applications as they might have become obsolete once our students start to teach in the real world. On the other hand, our students expect their professors to explain in detail which technologies to use and, more importantly, how to use them. Students in teacher education are often reluctant (or afraid?) to think for themselves, and false assumptions and myths permeate their vision on the role of ICT in learning and teaching.
In this presentation Jozef Colpaert will present and discuss the inconvenient truths he has been confronted with over the last two decades. He will show how periods of hypes and myths alternated with periods of common sense, and how current beliefs can be classified under ‘blurred ontologies’: flipped classrooms, digital natives, blended learning, MOOCs, digital pedagogy, etc.

EuroCALL Teacher Education SIG Workshop

Nice, 22-23 May, 2014