ICT in the teaching of music and art in French primary schools has only been introduced very recently. A new certificate in ICT (“Teacher C2I 2004”) has made its appearance in the Teacher Training departements of French Universities. This requires trainee primary school teachers (who have to proficient in a number of different fields) to master computer Science skills in all areas, including in the teaching of music and art (image and sound processing using a digital tool). What are the thoughts of these young teachers faced with learning this new skill required by the university? Even if they are used to manipulating images and music downloads in their own lives, we can ask them as teachers several questions about this particular field of teaching music and art in school. These are fields in which they are not usually specialists and this situation can raise questions about: - the downloading of music and images which requires guided reflection - the artistic work on the recorded sounds and images; an approach which is new to them - the visual translation of musical sounds which raises intersting questions about temporality for the children (comprehension of relationships between music and time with wave-editor apllications) Recent research (Vendramini, Fronville, 2007) has contributed to highlighting some of the impact digital has on primary school children. Another of our studies raised the question of the creation of indicators for assessment and evaluation in the teaching of music and art aided by the ICT (Vendramini, Séjourné, 2007). It tried to propose the critic necessary for a researcher to measure the effectiveness of teachers in the process related to creativity.

This paper proposes reflection on the training in “ICT music and art” undetaken by our trainee primary school teachers at the IUFM in Brittany (2007-2008). This research carried out among 250 trainees at the IUFM tries to evaluate the skills and expectations of these budding teachers in this field (interviews in situ, observing the use of the free software wave editor “Audacity”.) This paper attemps to understand the many paradoxes the trainees have to face in the context of their becoming professionnals, via this new certificate in computer Science and the internet.

The didactic transposition carried out by the trainees in this particular and often neglected field of music and art teaching would appear to reveal reactions that are also valid about other subjects: technical contraints, feasibility, difficulties in the evaluation, feeling that the training is lacking when teachers are confronted with the complexity of using ICT in the classroom. The ability to conduct a session of “guided creativity” as it was described by Jean-Pierre Mialaret (Mialaret, 1997), remains a complex skill for teachers to master even with ICT.