TITLE:
Empowering Early Childhood Pre-Service Teachers with Tech Fluency
AUTHORS:
Rae Ann Hirsh, Keely Baronak
KEYWORDS:
Early Childhood Education, Educational Technology, STEM, 21st Century Classroom
JOURNAL NAME:
Creative Education,
Vol.11 No.12,
December
22,
2020
ABSTRACT: Many early childhood pre-service teachers will bring some experience with technology into college which may include word processing, gaming, and social media. Some will have a knowledge of block or html programming.Working adult students often bring less experience. Technology in a 21st century elementary classroomintegrates technology tools intentionally and ethically. Teachers need to be able to adapt to new technologies and coding languagesquickly. Teachers need to embrace the interdisciplinary nature of Science-Technology-Engineering-Mathematics (STEM). A complex myriad of toolsand strategies exist. This can seem overwhelming and disconnected from the individual disciplinary goals in the classroom. Pre-service teacher preparation programs must empower pre-service teachers with technology fluency in order to respond to fluid and diverse challenges of the 21st century classroom.This exploratory research project synthesizes pedagogy, international technology standards, peer groups, technology trainings, student evaluations, growth mindset theory, and common readers to reform a small liberal arts college’s approach to early childhood pre-service teacher preparation. The curriculum revision was guided by these questions: 1) How do our pre-service teachers relate to the present and future worlds of themselves and of their students? 2) How can pre-services programs empower early childhood teachers with tech fluency? The exploration involved undergraduate pre-service teachers over a 6-year period. The research resulted in a five-phase approach to educational technology that consists of Play, Learn, Create, Plan, and Share. Pre-service teachers explore technology tools, learn how they work, create innovative robots and projects from the tools, plan curricula that integrate those tools, and develop agency through sharing their thinking, curricula, and projects with the broader educational community. This approach can offer innovative systemic changes in education technology pedagogy.