Selected aspects of conditions in the use of new media as an important part of the training of teachers in the Czech Republic and Poland - differences, risks and threats

The paper presents the complex problems of preparation of pedagogy students to work as teachers in the context of their readiness to use ICT in the didactic process. The complexity of this subject matter has been proved by the current, ongoing, discussion about the direction of the expected transformations of contemporary schools and the prospective teachers education system in the age of prevalent digitization. Considering the complexity of conditions, the main research problem has been formulated as follows: Conditions of what type affect the preparation of prospective teachers to use new media in learning and teaching process?. Thus, the empirical analysis conducted in the paper focuses on the following issues: the style of using new media by students, identification of students’ attitudes towards media, subjective (from the students’ point of view) assessment of how university level schools are prepared to shape modern media competences among their students and self-evaluation of media and IT competences in the group of prospective teachers. Czech and Polish students, despite being the so called digital natives, do not present homogeneous styles of using new media. They also reveal different attitudes toward applying digital solutions to the didactic process. Factors such as: low evaluation of one’s own competences or lack of evaluation in this area, lack of creative approach to the use of new media, lack of education in the area of new applications, lack of skills necessary to handle basic digital tools (e.g. interactive board, e-learning platforms) negatively affect, in most cases, the attitude toward the active use of ICT tools in future didactic work. On the basis of the gathered empirical data and inductive qualitative analysis a typology of students attitudes toward new media was developed. It consists of four categories: techno-optimist, techno-realist, techno-pessimist and techno-ignorant. The whole of analyses has the character of comparative research and involves two neighboring countries of the Visegrad Group: Poland (N = 466) and Czech Republic (N = 168).