Exploring the Student Teachers' Technological Knowledge for ICTs Integration.

Globally, the lackadaisical pace of the adoption of technology for teaching and learning in education has led to numerous evaluations of pre-service training programmes. The technology integration training programmes are observed as the attributes to the inefficacy of the pre-service teachers to integrate technology into learning. It is reported that the integration of technology is still low in the higher education as some institutions, are still using traditional ways of teaching and learning. This is the case at a study University of technology. For pre-service teachers to effectively teach with technology, they must possess three bases of knowledge as portrayed in Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge (TPACK) as a theoretical framework for the knowledge base. It is opined that TPACK assists in the technology integration in a specific educational context that is aligned to the content, pedagogy and the potential of technology. This paper will report on Technological knowledge of the TPACK framework. Technology knowledge is a critical knowledge that is required by preservice teachers because it plays a major role. Technological Knowledge includes being able to choose and use technology in context. The participants were 230 pre-service teachers in the School of Education in the University of Technology (UoT) in South Africa. They were selected randomly from three departments. Quantitative data was collected using adapted TPACK instrument focusing on item for the questions used in: TK1_19; TK2_20; TK3_12; TK4_12; TK5_4 and TK6_25. To determine whether there was a difference between males and females with respect to technology knowledge, an independent samples t-test was computed. Furthermore, to establish whether any differences would be established in terms of Technical Knowledge scores with respect to the departments participants were from, a one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was computed. In addition, a Tukey post-hoc analysis was carried out to establish which departments' scores were different. The results show that the t-test revealed a statistically significant difference (t (228) = 3.910, p < .05). It may be concluded that in this paper females possess a higher level of technical knowledge than males. A further study is recommended with all the subscale of the TPACK with a similar group of participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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