DEVELOPING ICT SKILLS IN PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS BY NOT TEACHING ICT SKILLS

The subject ICT in Primary Education is a compulsory subject in the graduate pre-service teacher education Master of Teaching (Primary) course at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Teacher candidates who complete the subject must learn how to use ICT to support children's learning in their classrooms and to develop skills is using a range of ICT tools for use both in the classroom and for professional purposes. Because of the limited time with teacher candidates (2h/week for 9 weeks) the subject workshops are designed to maximize learning about using ICT to support children's learning in the classroom, rather than on developing teacher candidates' ICT skills. Learning how to use ICT tools through the semester is required, but this is not the focus of the workshops. A further challenge of teaching the subject, in addition to the limited time with students, is the very mixed range of ICT skill sets of incoming teacher candidates; some have highly developed and specialist ICT skills, while for others using simple ICT tools is an ongoing challenge. The limited time with teacher candidates and this range of incoming ICT skills is addressed through not explicitly teaching ICT skills to teacher candidates, even though developing these skills is an outcome of the subject. Before class each week teacher candidates are required to view video tutorials about how to use ICT tools, rather than using class time to teach these skills. Online class notes direct teacher candidates to a series of short and targeted video tutorials that are generally on a commercial website (a subscription service) or on YouTube. Some teacher candidates will need to work their way through the full series of videos suggested, while others can view just those that fill gaps in their knowledge. This means that all teacher candidates enter the weekly 2h workshop with an understanding of the basic ICT skills for the programs to be used that week, such that they are ready to practice using the programs and to focus on how they could be used to support children's learning in their classroom. Thus, precious class time is used to practice skills in the context of supporting children's learning, to discuss implications to classroom practises, to resolve any confusions or concerns, and to look at ways that children's learning can be supported by using ICT. A secondary, but important, aspect of this subject's design is that teacher candidates develop the understanding that there are many online resources available to develop their ICT skills and using these resources becomes a habit. The specific ICT skills required of an education professional inevitably change quite regularly and so being able to up-skill oneself using online resources is a vital capability of education professionals.