Teacher education as distance education: Pre-service experience and the uses of technology

As colleges of education find their place in the digital age, there is considerable pressure to prepare their teacher candidates for life in the 21st century classroom. The call for more technology integration into teacher preparation assumes that students preparing to be teachers have the background and experience with technology to build upon. This study addresses two dimensions in the technology experiences of the group of students described with the generationally defined demographic term "Digital Native" and addresses a gap in the research on pre-service teacher candidates and their experience in a unique and completely distant teacher education internship. The research was completed through a qualitative, holistic single-case design focused on a single unit of analysis, the "Digital Native" pre-service teaching interns at a large, Midwestern research university (Yin, 2009, p. 46). This research tried to build on the work of Gruzd et al. (2012), which was the first study that used the Universal Theory of the Acceptance and Use of Technology for qualitative semi-structured interview research. Findings suggest that "facilitating conditions" and "effort expectancy" had the most influence on the acceptance and use of technology by "Digital Native" pre-service teaching interns in a distance learning program. Limitations of this research include concentration of the study on a single cohort of students in a unique pre-service internship program. Generalizing the results to other pre-service teacher distance education programs in different settings could be difficult.