ICT in Finnish Initial Teacher Education : Country report for the OECD/CERI New Millennium Learners Project ICT in Initial Teacher Training

The goal of this study was to investigate the current status in Finland for the international comparative study and to present recommendations for facilitating fruitful development in this area. In Finland initial teacher education for primary and secondary schools is presently found at eight universities of which it was decided to choose, in present terms (spring 2010), the University of Helsinki (Department of Teacher Education) and the University of Eastern Finland (School of Applied Educational Sciences and Teacher Education in Joensuu) for this study. The teacher training schools associated with the respective Faculties also co-operated and participated in the study. The questionnaires were translated from the English original to Finnish in an iterative process of several rounds checking some details from the Swedish version to ensure correct interpretations. A request to fill in the forms on the Internet was sent by e-mail to about 200 student teachers enrolled in the final teaching practice period (systematic sampling). Similarly, about 30 teacher educators and 30 mentor teachers were asked to fill in the respective forms at both universities. Another request to participate in the study was sent to about 500 student teachers (the next-year group) and all teaching staff and mentor teachers in November. Persons responsible for teacher education programmes at the two departments filled in the respective forms assisted by several staff members during the first round. They as well as representative groups of teacher educators, mentor teachers, and students were also interviewed (convenience sampling). We may interpret the survey data, combined with the interview, observation, and other data indicate that the motivation of teacher educators and mentor teachers to use information and communication technologies (ICT) in their teaching and guiding student teachers to use different technologies was high. Wishes for more co-operation of staff members at all involved institutions were expressed. Student teachers were also motivated to use modern equipment and innovative eaching methods, and reported help being available when needed. Peer support was deemed to be very important. Student teachers gave mainly positive feedback, but some saw a problem in the reality of practice teaching being more conservative than the expressed intentions of mentors and ducators. Even if modern equipment and an Internet connection of high quality were generally easily available, some practical problems in the accessibility could be identified and rapid technological development was seen as a major challenge. The situation was altogether very dynamic. A few years earlier there had been complete absence of ICT use in some subject areas, but now there was a major effort to update the equipment and to offer possibilities for versatile ICT use throughout the teacher education programmes. Both Departments involved in the study were active in research programmes focussing on ICT use in education and had a number of younger staff members enrolled in related doctoral studies. Based on the triangulation data including surveys and interviews, several recommendations for how ICT use in teacher education could be developed are given. The recommendations fall under the titles: Strategy level; Teacher education programme; Staff development programmes for teacher educators and mentor teachers; Research and development activities; and Monitoring and evaluation of the strategy implementation