Digital Story-telling to Improve 21st Century Skills: Pre-service Science Teachers' Reflections

In recent years, new methods and techniques have been widely used in education in order to increase the effectiveness of learning in various countries. The use of digital technologies in implementing these methods is also an important approach in terms of developing 21st century skills and adapting to technological developments. In this context, science education is one of the main areas where the use of technology is crucial. It is important that pre-service teachers who will be educate future generations to have 21st century skills. It is also important that they gain experience to synthesize these technology skills with their field knowledge. For this study, third-year pre-service science teachers developed digital stories on the striking scenes of scientists' lives, which allowed them using their field knowledge and apply their technology skills that they gained throughout undergraduate education. The aim of this study is to examine the experiences of science pre-service teachers in terms of 21st century skills. This study is designed as a phenomenology research. The criterion sampling was used from the purposeful sampling methods to determine the participants. The research was carried out with forty 3-year pre-service teachers from Science Teaching Department of a public university in Turkey during the fall semester of 2018-2019 academic years. Digital stories have been prepared in relation to a striking part of the life stories of scientists who had research on subjects from the secondary school science curriculum. The study was completed in a period of approximately 3 months. In this study, digital dairies were used as the data collection tool. Dairies were analyzed using content analysis technique. Reflections of pre-service teachers that they were provided in dairies were examined in terms of 21st century skills. Three main categories given by P21 (2008) were used as themes: learning and innovation skills, information, media, and technology skills, and life and career skills. The preliminary analysis revealed that digital story-telling process contributed all three main categories under the following sub-categories: critical thinking and problem-solving, collaboration, information-media-ICT literacy, flexibility, productivity.