The purpose of this study is to investigate pre-service primary teachers’ perspectives on their technology training sessions throughout the teacher training year and its effects on shaping their future lessons. This one-year training degree in England is called as the Postgraduate Certificate in Education or the PGCE in short. Pre-service teachers are asked to attend up to 60 credits at the master’s level in order to complete the requirements of the degree.

Primary school is the first step for these students to learn many subjects from mathematics and science to history and geography. Thus, meeting the technological needs of students in primary school is always considered as a very important criterion in English primary school curricula (Department for Education [DfE], 2004, 2013b). Primary school teachers can be thought of as the core agency of planning and delivering lessons whose objectives are predetermined by the primary school curriculum. Learning their beliefs and perspectives on technology integration into their lessons, therefore, is one of the most important criteria to understand whether they meet the needs of their students (Saralar & Ainsworth, 2017; Saralar, Isiksal & Akyuz, 2016).

The need for the integration of technology in the schools of primary children gained speed since the establishment of the first national curriculum in Wales and England in 1988 because the statutory curriculum required primary school students between five to sixteen years of age to have the ability to use technological tools (Hodgkinson & Wild, 1994). Therefore, the researchers in the year of 1994 believed that to teach technology to those students, candidate teachers should prepare themselves for teaching students how to use technology in their lives and the Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) programmes have a critical role in preparing the pre-service teachers to involve technology in their lessons (Hodgkinson & Wild, 1994).

From 1988 to 2019, the desire of the English government for technology integration in primary school has increased in that not only in primary school but also in the early years’ education they have set more specific and clear expectations regarding technology integration. Under the subject design and technology, they planned four aims that students can have at the end of Key Stage 2 and two of them are directly related to the students’ technology-use. They expect primary school children to:

1)            “develop the creative, technical and practical expertise needed to perform everyday tasks confidently and to participate successfully in an increasingly technological world”

2)            “build and apply a repertoire of knowledge, understanding and skills in order to design and make high-quality prototypes and products for a wide range of users” (Department for Education [DfE], 2013a).

Also, considering that the PGCE course only lasts one year and people who have bachelor’s degrees from very different subjects can apply for it to be primary school teachers, the PGCE course seems to take a more significant role. Pre-service teachers attending to the PGCE constitute the next year’s primary school teachers. Current PGCE programmes in many universities are in the progress of developing to meet pre-service teachers’ and their students’ needs (Sullivan, 2018). Therefore, it is important to look at training sessions on technology integration through the eyes of current PGCE students and their experiences as their current views will potentially give insights into their attitudes toward using technology after being a qualified teacher.

In light of this, the research questions of this study are:

1)            What are the perspectives of pre-service teachers on technology training throughout the PGCE year?

2)            How do the pre-service teachers benefit from the PGCE course with regard to technology integration into their future lessons?

The researchers selected a case study as the design of this study. Among different types of case study designs, proposed by Yin (2003), the researchers selected holistic single-case study as the design of the current study since the participants were studying in the same PGCE programme of the same university. Among different universities, the focused university was considered as one of the typical universities which fitted our research aims. The university locates in England, having students more than 30.000 each year. The education department opens the PGCE Primary course (5-11 age) for applicants coming from the various educational and professional background. The participants of the study were six (four females, two males) pre-service primary school teachers, studying to become trained teachers. All of them completed the first part of their teacher training and registered to the second half of the PGCE course in a public university in England. They were in their final three to four months before starting to their actual teaching jobs as qualified primary school teachers during the data collection period. The data collected through semi-structured one-to-one interviews which lasted forty-five minutes to an hour. Each interview was conducted in one of the classrooms in the participants’ university which is a place where participants were already familiar with. The researchers considered the Technology, Pedagogy and Content knowledge framework, in short TPCK or TPACK, as a basis of their data analysis (Mishra & Koehler, 2006; Niess, 2005, 2006). This framework was an extension of Shulman's (1986) PCK with a further aim to prepare pre-service teachers to teach with technology in addition to the training sessions on pedagogy and content knowledge. Hence, the analysis of the interview data included the selection of all aspects of technology as well as pedagogy, and content knowledge. Data analysis started with transcription of interviews. We transcribed the participants’ answers to each interview question separately, i.e., all participants’ answers to the first question were written underneath the first question. The same procedure was repeated for all questions. Thematic analysis was conducted to analyse transcribed data. We read written answers to each interview question repeatedly and coded the aspects of TPACK in the data. Based on the final codes that were emerged in the data, we created themes and put the similar and/or related codes under the same theme as suggested by Miles, Huberman and Saldana (2014).

The findings of the study showed that there are three main issues discussed by the pre-service teachers. We presented these three themes according to the chronological order; theme 1 explored teaching and technology experience as a learner, which may have affected their perceptions of technology competency. Secondly, their current technology integration practices and competencies were explained in theme 2: perceived technology competency and practices with technology. Finally, theme 3 discussed pre-service primary teachers’ plans on technology integration and possible examples from their plans. (1) Teaching and technology experience as a learner: This theme explored pre-service teachers’ educational background. It included pre-service teachers’ experiences with technology in their bachelor and PGCE degrees. There was no specific module provided for the participants on technology integration other than one-hour lesson on technology-use until now and there was no expected module by the end. (2) Perceived technology competency and its importance: This theme looked for pre-service teachers’ self-confidence and internal experiences with the technology integration into classrooms. This included participants’ own experiences of teaching with technology during placement or tutoring experiences. Pre-service primary teachers reported that they use educational technologies throughout their lessons from the start to the end but for different purposes in each phase. (3) Plans on technology integration: This theme discovered participants’ plans on technology integration in their future lessons. This theme covered plans related to particular technologies in teaching mathematics and literacy. Most of the pre-service primary teachers said that they prefer to integrate digital tools into their lessons on mathematical topics rather than literacy. To conclude, technology integration into lessons became almost a must for the primary school teachers since the current curriculum has a set of detailed learning aims on technology. Yet, the findings showed that pre-service teachers were not being prepared comprehensively during their PGCE course year.

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