As in most European countries, the New Curricula in Spain for primary and secondary education is competence-based, which means that teachers need to envisage learning as a process that takes places through action (Wertsch, 1998); through the students’ participation in meaningful social activities and organise teaching accordingly. This principle, grounded on the premises of the socioconstructivist approach to learning, implies that, by carrying out specific tasks, individuals take an active part in the processes of acquiring field knowledge and of developing abilities (Mercer, 1997; Lemke, 1997; Noguerol, 2001, Dooly & Masats, 2011). This is possible because knowledge can only be constructed if it is contextualized and can only be transformed and acquired through social interaction (González et al., 2008). From this perspective, then, the development of students’ communicative competence is at the core of learning. Such competence is associated with language and literature education in most curricula in Spain, yet, the Catalan curriculum is unique in the sense that explicitly states that the development of learners’ communicative competence is also bound to media education. Thus, being competent means possessing the ability to put into play the resources necessary to solve the problematic situations one may encounter as a citizen in a ‘wired society’. Such an objective cannot be attained if teachers today are not eager and ready to include ICT education and social networking in the foreground of their teaching practices. This implies that teacher education faces a new challenge: to train non ICT experts to be able to teach the new generation of children who are mostly ‘digital natives‘.

Research has proved that student-teachers who learn to use technology during their pre-service studies are far more likely to incorporate technology in their future classes than those who have not had hands-on experience with its use (McKinney, 1998; Goldsby and Fazal, 2000). Likewise, student-teachers tend to reproduce traditional methods during their own teaching as they rely on own experiences as learners, especially in moments of tension or uncertainty (Pajares 1992, Dooly &bEatsman, 2008).

Our objective was to create a teacher education environment in which student-teachers –future language teachers in primary education– could learn to use technology by taking part in context-bound social activities to attain a communal goal. We asked two groups of pre-service language teachers from different universities to work together to create a story on a video-format, targeted at their pupils during their school placements. We then posed a questionnaire to get them evaluate their experience and elicit their beliefs on their ability to replicate the experience with their future students. We had two research questions: a) Are student-teacher faced with first-hand experience on digital education? And b) Do student-teacher trainers feel capable of designing proposals that embrace the joint development of linguistic and audiovisual competences if they experience one as learners?

Our research is funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, through the project entitled Plurilingual, Audiovisual and Digital Competences as Means to Construct Knowledge in Multilingual and Multicultural Communities of Practice (PADS), ref. EDU2010-17859).

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