Chapter 13: Technology in Education, Technology in Life: Toward a Holistic Perspective on Integration in Preparing Tomorrow’s Teachers at the University of Illinois

Prevailing approaches to Preparing Teachers to Teach with Technology (PT3) tend to focus largely on technological skills and strategies for curricular integration and standards alignment. Yet without considering the inherent value that future teachers place on technology in education, and more important, on technology in their personal lives, pre-service programs risk failing to engage tomorrow’s teachers as whole persons. This chapter reports on efforts in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign that are addressing this consideration: the Office of Educational Technology’s federally funded PT3 grant, and the research-based Technology, Identity, Lifestyle, and Education Study (TILES). Our findings revealed that Education students use technology in purposeful ways, and that they value particular kinds of technology differently in personal and professional contexts. We also found that when pre-service teachers completed tutorials in creating multimedia, their sense of the overall value of technology in education had no significant relationship to their perceived change in skills. Their sense of identity as a teacher was a more effective predictor of how they valued technology in education. Implications of these findings for the design of technology research and PT3 are discussed.