Developing pre-service teachers’ technological, pedagogical and content knowledge through the creation of digital storybooks for use in early years classrooms

ABSTRACT

This article reports on an investigation of pre-service teachers’ views on creating digital storybooks for use in early childhood classrooms, and how this activity helped them develop technological, pedagogical and content knowledge for teaching literacy. Cohorts of Master of Teaching PSTs (n = 67) participated in the study over five years. This article also presents a rationale for the creation of digital storybooks as a resource for teaching early literacy. Data for this mixed-methods study came from an online survey, focus group discussions, and PSTs’ reflective comments and analysis of their digital storybooks and rationales. This article focuses primarily on the survey data. The majority of PSTs reported that the process of creating digital storybooks and using them during professional practice was useful in helping them develop their technological, pedagogical and content knowledge for teaching literacy in the early years, as well as their knowledge about students.

KEYWORDS:

• TPACK
• digital storybooks
• early literacy
• teacher education
• digital text

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Grace Oakley

Grace Oakley is an academic at the Graduate School of Education at The University of Western Australia. She teaches in the areas of early childhood and primary literacy and English and conducts research in literacy, learning technologies, mobile learning and teacher professional development.