ATTITUDES AND PERCEPTIONS OF PEDAGOGICAL FORMATION PHYSICAL EDUCATION STUDENTS ABOUT WEB 2.0 TOOLS AND FACTORS FOR SUCCESSFUL ADAPTATION OF THESE TOOLS

Today, use of the Web 2.0 technologies and applications (e.g. text messaging, wikis, personal web pages, social networks, blogs) in many different areas of education have been increasing, and this can be seen as an important development. However, teaching candidates from specific subject matters, such as physical education, still appear unaware of the potential benefits of such tools in a teaching and learning environment. The purpose of this study was to assess pre-service teachers’ perceptions about Web 2.0 technologies and to explore the awareness of this technology among students using the Technology Acceptance Modal (TAM). In this context, the descriptive survey method was used and a questionnaire was applied to 79 pre-service students (53 male and 26 female) enrolled in the physical education department in Dokuz Eylul University. The data for this study was collected by the researcher through a questionnaire after 2017-2018 fall semester of the course including weekly web 2.0 activities based on the lesson topic. The results of the study indicate that gender was an important factor that affected the implementation or use of this technology. Accordingly, male students had higher levels of awareness about web 2.0 applications than female students had. The study also showed that usefulness and ease-of-use are two significant factors that affect students’ attitude towards this technology.  Article visualizations

Exploring social media technologies for novice EFL school teachers to collaborate and communicate : A case in the Czech Republic

With an increasing number of international schools, traditional EFL teaching methods may not satisfy students’ needs. This study aims to investigate perceptions of social media technologies (e.g., Web 2.0) and willingness to adopt such technologies to collaborate and communicate in multicultural classrooms among novice EFL schoolteachers in the Czech Republic. The participants were 100 novice EFL schoolteachers in Prague and the South Moravian regions of the Czech Republic. The study used a mixed research method consisting of a survey (stage 1) and a semi-structured interview (stage 2). The survey examined the participants’ appraisal and concerns of using social media technologies to collaborate and to communicate as well as the level of willingness to use social media technologies. A hierarchical cluster analysis using participants’ responses regarding their attitudes and behavioural tendency towards using Web 2.0 social media technologies in language classrooms identified three clusters of teachers. The teachers who were most likely to adopt social Web 2.0 technologies were those who had the highest ratings on both appraisals and concerns regarding the use of social media in language classrooms. The results from the semi-structured interviews were consistent with those from the survey. Together, the results from the two stages demonstrated that most pre-service teachers favoured using Web 2.0 technology for collaboration and communication among colleagues and stakeholders in a broader community, but they displayed contrasting levels of appraisal of and concerns towards using social media technologies. Participants believed that this might be due to their different levels of ICT proficiency, workload, and working environment. The political and practical implications in K-12 education in the Czech context are also discussed

Understanding College Students\u27 Readiness to Use Web 2.0 Technologies in Online Education

Web 2.0 technologies offer many educational benefits in higher education. Leaders of the U.S. community college examined in this study desired to explore students\u27 familiarity with the educational benefits of Web 2.0 tools before investing in technology upgrades for the college. The purpose of this quantitative survey research was to explore community college student readiness to use Web 2.0 technologies as part of their distance learning experience. The research questions were designed to clarify students\u27 attitudes and behavioral intentions towards using Web 2.0 applications. Data were collected from 253 randomly selected distance-learning students using a survey derived from the decomposed theory of planned behavior (DTPB). The DTPB assesses individuals\u27 likely actions related to using Web 2.0 technologies as a function of behavioral intentions reflected through attitude, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control. Results of the Spearman rho analyses indicated significant positive relationships related to Web 2.0 applications between attitude and behavioral intentions, subjective norms and behavior, peer influence and subjective norms, and self-efficacy with facilitating conditions and perceived behavioral control. There was no relationship between perceived behavioral control and behavior. Additional findings revealed that students perceived the existence of a beneficial social network within the distance-learning environment. The results of this study facilitated college administrator awareness of students\u27 perceptions of using Web 2.0 tools for learning, and suggest that implementing these tools would be beneficial for the students and college by creating a more inclusive learning environment for online students

Collaborative writing with web 2.0 technologies: education students' perceptions

Executive Summary Web 2.0 technologies are becoming popular in teaching and learning environments. Among them several online collaborative writing tools, like wikis and blogs, have been integrated into educational settings. Research has been carried out on a wide range of subjects related to wikis, while other, comparable tools like Google Docs and EtherPad remain largely unexplored in the literature. This work presents a case study investigating education students' perceptions of collaborative writing using Google Docs and EtherPad. Both tools provide opportunity for multiple users to work on the same document simultaneously, have a separate space for written metacommunication, and are promoted by software designers to be fairly intuitive to adopt without prior training. The work investigates if perceptions depend on factors such as gender, age, digital competence, interest in digital tools, educational settings, and choice of writing tool, and examines if the tools are easy to use and effective in group work. This paper focuses on quantitative results of survey questionnaires. Further qualitative analysis will be presented in a later paper. The theoretical framework is drawn from two learning theories, the social-constructivist learning theory and the community of practice, and their relationships to collaborative tools. Related re-search literature is characterized by a number of issues: positive elements of use, advantages of using Web 2.0 technologies, critical issues regarding the pedagogical value of Web 2.0, and the role of the teacher in using these technologies. The case study participants were 201 education students who just began their four-year initial teacher education at two study programs with a total of six classes at the university Teacher Education Unit. They were assigned a collaborative writing task and asked to take an on-line survey on completion. When the survey closed, a total of 166 students (83.6%) had participated. The results were analyzed based on frequency distributions. The hypothesis that students with high digital competence and a positive attitude towards digital tools are more positive than average seems to be confirmed. Also gender does not play any particular role. As for younger students being more positive than older, the population of older students was so low that no conclusion can be drawn. The work does not validate that EtherPad users are more positive than Google Docs users, but this may be explained by EtherPad being unavailable for some time during the students' collaborative writing period. Furthermore only 13.9% of the students were motivated to use the tools for collaboration, and only a minority of the students (15.7%) reported that the quality of collaboration in the group increased with use of the tools. Likewise, the tools did not work as expected for a majority of the students (70.5%). Forty-seven percent of the students liked to comment and edit others contributions to group work. Although the results cannot be generalized to a larger group of students, and no definite conclusions can be drawn from the questionnaires about the usefulness and effectiveness of Google Docs and EtherPad for collaborative writing, the results cannot be underestimated since some results are consistent with the research literature. Future research consists of the qualitative evaluation of the students' comments to open ended-questions in the questionnaire, the students' collaborative essay papers, and their contributions to group work. It may also be important to examine the extent and quality of utilization of the tools for collaborative writing. Triangulation of the data collected may shed light on how they really perceived the effectiveness of Google Docs and EtherPad to support collaborative writing among student

The net generation and digital natives: implications for higher education

Executive Summary "Our students have changed radically. Today�s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach." (Prensky 2001 p1) 1. There is no evidence that there is a single new generation of young students entering Higher Education and the terms Net Generation and Digital Native do not capture the processes of change that are taking place. 2. The complex changes that are taking place in the student body have an age related component that is most obvious with the newest waves of technology. Prominent amongst these are the uses made of social networking sites (e.g. Facebook), uploading and manipulation of multimedia (e.g. YouTube) and the use of handheld devices to access the mobile Internet. 3. Demographic factors interact with age to pattern students� responses to new technologies. The most important of these are gender, mode of study (distance or place-based) and the international or home status of the student. 4. The gap between students and their teachers is not fixed, nor is the gulf so large that it cannot be bridged. In many ways the relationship is determined by the requirements teachers place upon their students to make use of new technologies and the way teachers integrate new technologies in their courses. There is little evidence that students enter university with demands for new technologies that teachers and universities cannot meet. 5. Students persistently report that they prefer moderate use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in their courses. Care should be taken with this finding because the interpretation of what is �moderate� use of ICT may be changing as a range of new technologies take off and become embedded in social life and universities. 6. Universities should be confident in the provision of what might seem to be basic services. Students appreciate and make use of the foundational infrastructure for learning, even where this is often criticised as being an out of date and unimaginative use of new technology. Virtual Learning Environments (Learning or Course Management Systems) are used widely and seem to be well regarded. The provision by university libraries of online services, including the provision of online e-journals and e-books, are also positively received. 7. Students do not naturally make extensive use of many of the most discussed new technologies such as Blogs, Wikis and 3D Virtual Worlds. The use of 3D Virtual Worlds is notably low amongst students. The use of Wikis and Blogs is relatively low overall, but use does vary between different contexts, including national and regional contexts. Students who are required to use these technologies in their courses are unlikely to reject them and low use does not imply that they are inappropriate for educational use. The key point being made is that there is not a natural demand amongst students that teaching staff and universities should feel obliged to satisfy. 8. There is no obvious or consistent demand from students for changes to pedagogy at university (e.g. demands for team and group working). There may be good reasons why teachers and universities wish to revise their approaches to teaching and learning, or may wish to introduce new ways of working. Students will respond positively to changes in teaching and learning strategies that are well conceived, well explained and properly embedded in courses and degree programmes. However there is no evidence of a pent-up demand amongst students for changes in pedagogy or of a demand for greater collaboration. 9. There is no evidence of a consistent demand from students for the provision of highly individualised or personal university services. The development of university infrastructures, such as new kinds of learning environments (for example Personal Learning Environments) should be choices about the kinds of provision that the university wishes to make and not a response to general statements about what a new generation of students are demanding. 10. Advice derived from generational arguments should not be used by government and government agencies to promote changes in university structure designed to accommodate a Net Generation of Digital Natives. The evidence indicates that young students do not form a generational cohort and they do not express consistent or generationally organised demands. A key finding of this review is that political choices should be made explicit and not disguised by arguments about generational change

A literature review of the use of Web 2.0 tools in Higher Education

This review focuses on the use of Web 2.0 tools in Higher Education. It provides a synthesis of the research literature in the field and a series of illustrative examples of how these tools are being used in learning and teaching. It draws out the perceived benefits that these new technologies appear to offer, and highlights some of the challenges and issues surrounding their use. The review forms the basis for a HE Academy funded project, ‘Peals in the Cloud’, which is exploring how Web 2.0 tools can be used to support evidence-based practices in learning and teaching. The project has also produced two in-depth case studies, which are reported elsewhere (Galley et al., 2010, Alevizou et al., 2010). The case studies focus on evaluation of a recently developed site for learning and teaching, Cloudworks, which harnesses Web 2.0 functionality to facilitate the sharing and discussion of educational practice. The case studies aim to explore to what extent the Web 2.0 affordances of the site are successfully promoting the sharing of ideas, as well as scholarly reflections, on learning and teaching

Digital or Diligent? Web 2.0's challenge to formal schooling

This paper explores the tensions that arise for young people as both 'digital kids' and 'diligent students'. It does so by drawing on a study conducted in an elite private school, where the tensions between 'going digital' and 'being diligent' are exacerbated by the high value the school places on academic achievement, and on learning through digital innovation. At the school under study, high levels of intellectual and technological resourcing bring with them an equally high level of expectation to excel in traditional academic tasks and high-stakes assessment. The students, under constant pressure to perform well in standardised tests, need to make decisions about the extent to which they take up school-sanctioned digitally enhanced learning opportunities that do not explicitly address academic performance. The paper examines this conundrum by investigating student preparedness to engage with a new learning innovation – a student-led media centre – in the context of the traditional pedagogical culture that is relatively untouched by such digital innovation. The paper presents an analysis of findings from a survey of 481 students in the school. The survey results were subjected to quantitative regression tree modelling to flesh out how different student learning dispositions, social and technological factors influence the extent to which students engage with a specific digital learning opportunity in the form of the Web 2.0 Student Media Centre (SMC) designed to engage the senior school community in flexible digital-networked learning. What emerges from the study is that peer support, perceived ease of use and usefulness, learning goals and cognitive playfulness are significant predictors of the choices that students make to negotiate the fundamental tensions of being digital and/or diligent. In scrutinising the tensions around a digital or a diligent student identity in this way, the paper contributes new empirical evidence to understanding the problematic relationship between student-led learning using new digital media tools and formal schooling

Educating generation next: screen media use, digital competencies and tertiary education

Investigates the use of screen media and digital competencies of higher education students in light of the growing focus on new media and e-learning in Australian universities. Abstract The authors argue that there is a need to resist the commonplace utopian and dystopian discourses surrounding new media technological innovation, and approach the issue of its potential roles and limitations in higher education settings with due care. The article analyses survey data collected from first-year university students to consider what screen media they currently make use of, how frequently these media are interacted with, and in what settings and for what purposes they are used. The article considers what implications the digital practices and competencies of young adults have for pedagogical programs that aim to engage them in virtual environments