Information and communication technology (ICT) is generally omnipresent in our society. This permeation of ICT in all areas of life has also affected education in several ways. In the last decade, many education systems have implemented policy strategies to integrate ICT in the classrooms. This goes along with actions including increased access to ICT resources, facilitating the development of teachers' technological pedagogical content knowledge (Tondeur et al., 2012), and integrating ICT literacy in national school curricula (Erstad & Voogt, 2018). As a consequence of this emphasis on ICT in education, teachers face many new tasks in order to use ICT efficiently in the classroom, to promote the learning of all students, their learning outcomes, to foster their ICT literacy, and to prepare them for participating in the life in the 21^st century. However, teacher education is only adopting innovations referring to ICT use in schools very slowly (OECD, 2019). The Second International Handbook of Information Technology for Primary and Secondary Education (Voogt, Knezek, Christensen & Lai, 2018) synthesizes research on ICT in primary and secondary education and outlines several debates and challenges for teachers and teacher education: There is a need for teachers to develop technological knowledge, in addition to pedagogical and content knowledge. Since many teachers continue to use IT primarily to support the dissemination of content rather than to engage students in creative activities, teachers need to learn about the application of ICT in supporting learning in the 21^st century. The instructional strategies teachers use in the classroom have to evolve due to the influences of ICT. Furthermore, teachers’ self-efficacy, positive attitudes, and beliefs are also important in the context of teaching in the digital age (Eickelmann & Vennemann, 2017). Thus, it is stated that how to support teachers in a technology-enhanced environment remains a key issue (Voogt et al., 2018). This support involves a reconsideration of pre-service teacher education with regard to ICT in teaching and learning processes.

Recent research indicates that pre-service teachers’ ICT training varies a lot between European countries (European Commission, 2013) and that teachers need more training in order to use ICT in teaching and learning efficiently (Fraillon et al., 2014; OECD, 2014). Thus, implications for teacher education in the digital age are needed. The theme of this symposium relates to concerns about ICT in teacher education in Europe and will discuss the question how teacher education prepares and should prepare pre-service teachers to use ICT in classrooms to enhance learning processes and learning outcomes from the perspective of four European countries, namely the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, and Norway. In detail, research-based contributions on pre-service teachers’ professional reasoning about the use of technology for teaching and learning as well as their self-estimated technology integration skills are included. Furthermore, the relevance of pre-service teachers’ training to use ICT in instruction for the actual use in the classroom is taken into consideration. Thus the effect of their own teacher education can be approached. Besides, cyber ethics in initial teacher education is addressed. It will be discussed what characterizes initial student teachers’ knowledge of cyber ethics in initial teacher education, focusing on aspects of copyright and sharing of images.  Finally, there will be a focus on teacher educators by profiling their readiness towards using blended learning in their educational practice.

Thus, the symposium, organized by Ramona Lorenz and Birgit Eickelmann, will provide empirically underpinned issues and considerations for developing pre-service teacher education in Europe.

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