In today's society people are surrounded by information and communication technology (ICT) and we are assumed to use technology in everyday life. However, in school context the role of ICT is challenging (Borko 2009). Latterly, challenges of educational use of ICT are considered by generational perspectives. Instead of investigating teachers’ individual choices and individual pedagogical beliefs, educational use of ICT is seen as generational differences and similarities in technology enhanced learning. In our research we have connected these two perspectives. We are interested in how individual and generation perspectives are connected in educational use of ICT.

Research indicates that educational use of ICT is challenging for teachers (Hammond 2009). ICT is expected to change teachers’ pedagogical practices; meanwhile integration is seen to be based on teachers’ attitudes and knowledge (Cullen 2011). Attitudes and pedagogical beliefs are traditionally examined as teachers’ individual perceptions and individual choices (Sang 2010). Recently, teachers’ attitudes and pedagogical beliefs are discussed by the perspective of generation. Integration of technology is expected to be easier for younger generations than for older generations. Nowadays student teachers are assumed to belong to these young generation who are born in digital age and who are familiar with ICT (Bennett 2010, Valtonen 2011). However, generation is seen to be too wide perspective to evaluate educational use of ICT and research has indicated that there are differences how student teachers use ICT in everyday life and how student teachers integrate ICT into teaching and learning.

Above all, student teachers are identified to hesitate to integrate technology in teaching and learning (Chen 2010) and they also tend to just update traditional teaching practices with ICT instead of developing new teaching methods (Hammond 2009, Valtonen 2011). Our own perceptions as teacher trainers support these findings. In our research we assume that the nature of ICT integration is multifaceted for individual student teachers (Lei 2009) meanwhile their experiences about ICT are different from older teachers. Therefore, the aim of our study is to increase understanding of how student teachers justify ICT integration and how student teachers indentify their generation as prospective teachers who use ICT in education. Our research offer detailed information about integration process of educational use of ICT in the context of teacher education.

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