Using the Internet in science teaching? Issues and challenges for initial teacher education

Abstract

This article reports on a research study that looked at the issues and challenges of training new science teachers to use the Internet in their planning and teaching. It was conducted within three university departments in England and focused on an exploration of the issues and challenges facing trainee teachers in using the Internet in their science teaching and whether using the Internet in science teaching demands a new pedagogy. The research explored this area through investigating the use of a set of teacher education materials developed by the authors to enhance their trainee teachers’ use of the Internet. The findings reveal that there are many similarities in the use of the Internet with other ICT or science activities, including pedagogical issues around how to organise group work, the role of the teacher and even the geography of the teaching environment. However, there were some key differences which the article highlights, particularly using the Internet as a resource for research activities in science which raised issues for teachers and pupils in selecting appropriate websites from such a wealth of information. The article ends with a consideration of the implications of these findings for initial teacher education in science.

Keywords:

• internet
• science education
• initial teacher education

Notes

¹A starter is a short activity at the beginning of a lesson and can be focused on getting pupils thinking or it can be about judging what they have remembered from the previous lesson. A plenary is normally an activity that is used to assess the children’s learning and judging where they have got to.

²A cloze exercise is a ‘fill-in-the-blanks’ task where the student is required to complete a series of sentences.