The digital kids technology camp: A course for teaching pre-service teachers effective technology integration

This paper describes an innovative course that blends together online learning with a preservice teacher experience in the context of a technology camp. Pre-service teachers engaged with the designing digital music, stop-animations, games, and multimedia productions; and subsequently, worked with rising 3 to 6 graders to teach them how to create the same type of artifacts. Pre-service teachers responded to a prompt about student-generated multimedia both before and after the experience. These data were analyzed using the constant comparative method. Results collapsed into four themes: learning together, produce or consume, expression of ideas, and 21 century skills. Results and discussed and an overview of the course is provided. Introduction There remains a strong tradition in the field of educational technology to share the discourse on practices and research about effective technology integration into teacher education programs. In fact, journals have been established for this very purpose (e.g., Journal of Technology and Teacher Education or the Journal of Digital Learning in Teacher Education) and conferences as well (e.g., Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education). This paper follows this tradition by describing a course for pre-service teachers called the Digital Kids Technology Camp, a graduate course offered by a large land-grant university in the southeastern United States. This course serves dual purposes: 1) the Camp is an opportunity for 3 to 6 graders to develop technology skills in designing and creating games, producing digital animations, creating music, and developing programming skills, and 2) the Camp is an opportunity for pre-service teachers to develop this same set of skills but to also teach these skills to the campers, a population with which many of the pre-service teachers will soon be working in a classroom setting. This paper will describe the core components of this course and will use qualitative analysis (analysis of student responses to a prompt and analysis of student artifacts) to describe the perceptions and experiences of preservice teachers that have taken this course on two occasions. It is our goal to provide educators a framework for offering similar courses at their respective institutions. Course Framework The Digital Kids Technology Camp (DKTC) is focused on student-generated multimedia as an overarching framework (Ellis, 2001; Gobert & Clement, 1999; Green & Brown, 2002; Hall, Bailey, Tillman, 1997; Mitchell, Andreatta, & Capella, 2004; Mitchel, 2003). That is, both pre-service teachers and campers develop multimedia artifacts to demonstrate their understanding in a learner-centered setting. Specifically, within the DKTC, learners are provided the opportunity to develop a wide variety of digital multimedia artifacts, including digital music, interactive multimedia, virtual stop-animations, physical stop-animations, and games. Table 1 provides an overview of the six assignments that were required to be completed by the pre-service teachers. The first five weeks of the course are focused on pre-service teachers learning how to use various software packages, including GarageBand, Scratch, Pivot/Stykz, MoveiMaker or iMovie, and GameMaker. The course during the first five weeks is online with optional sessions to learn how to use the software tools from the instructor. The course is facilitated using the Moodle learning management system. The final week of the course is a camp held on the campus of the institution during the five day work week. The DKTC invites rising 3 to 6 graders from across the region that the university serves for a small fee of $125.