5.2 Benchmarks for Teacher Education Programs in the Pedagogical Use of Ict

The 22-page subject index of the report of the AERA Panel on Research and Teacher Education (Cochran-Smith and Zeichner, 2006) has no entries referring to information and communication technologies (ICTs) and only two referring to computers. Several chapters remark that teachers should develop ICT skills, but what this actually means is not discussed to any substantial degree. This does not mean that there are no publications on the subject or that research on ICT and teacher education and teacher learning is non-existent. Two worlds seem to be on different sides of a divide: the main stream teacher education research does not pay much attention to ICT while researchers studying ICT pay little attention to research conducted on teacher education. This chapter attempts to bring these two worlds closer to each other, presenting benchmarks for both preand in-service teacher education programs. Benchmarking is a process through which organizations evaluate different aspects of their processes in relation to best practice with the aim of improving performance. The benchmarks, in this case, could be seen as standards demanded of teacher certification education programs. Teacher education programs should stimulate the pedagogical use of ICT to improve existing teaching practice and contribute to the development of new, innovative teaching practices. Pedagogical use of ICT refers to how teachers use ICT to facilitate student learning. In referring to pedagogical use of ICT in this chapter, we include all three major perspectives on learning: (a) behaviorist-empiricist, (b) cognitive-rationalist, and (c) situative-pragmatist-sociohistoric (Dede, 2008; Greeno et al.,1996).