Sammendrag
The information-rich society of today requires teaching for science teacher students that enable them to develop their subject matter knowledge (SMK) and their understanding and use of relevant ICT tools in their own learning process as well as in their future work as teachers. The "connectivism" theory (Siemens 2005) may serve as a useful framework for understanding how students might learn information literacy, describing learning environments that are informal, connection-based and network-creating.
The use of various ICT-tools in the learning of geology topics in Norwegian integrated science teacher courses is used in the present study in order to investigate elements of connectivism. The Norwegian teacher-training program for primary and lower secondary school requires students to acquire SMK jointly with pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). The teaching activities investigated in the present study used an inquiry based approach and gave the students access to various tools in order to adapt the teaching to the students various levels of prior competence.
We collected reflections from 24 students after they had finished tasks where they used various place-based ICT-tools to create their own websites suitable for fellow students' exam preparation.
Some students reported the need to improve their SMK in order to take full advantage of the tools, somewhat surprisingly, calling out for traditional teacher-lead sequences. On the other hand, some students reported that working with these tasks they improved their SMK in geology through the process. Several respondents deemed the use of this type of ICT-tools as highly relevant for teaching students in primary and lower secondary school place-based topics. However, several commented that such tools need to be easy to use and that some tools should be improved in these aspects. Such teaching may function connectivistic provided that tools are matched to students' competence level regarding science subject matter and ICT.
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