In Sweden, as well as in other countries, the digital revolution has impacted society profoundly (Brynjolfsson & MacAffe, 2015). The digital evolution, or revolution, has created a need of new digital competences for both teachers in preschools, elementary school, secondary school, upper secondary school and higher education (Ministry of Enterprise and Innovation, 2017). These digital competences both include technological and pedagogical knowledge in order to teach successfully in the digital society (e.g. Davies et al 1997; Granberg 2010; Instefjord & Munthe 2016).

There is a need to develop TE in order to meet this challenge. The aim of our development project, running during one semester (autumn 2018) was to contribute to innovation in teacher education through a conscious use of digital technology. The concept of TPACK is employed as a tool to explore the ways in which technology impacts on what is learned in TE. The following research questions are formulated: In what ways does the use of ICT contribute to student teachers planning and reflecting regarding their teaching in school? What added pedagogical values in teacher education practice can be discerned from the perspective of the student teachers in this project?   

Our theoretical framework is based on Koehler & Mishra’s (2009) concept of technological content knowledge, TPACK. The notion of TPACK is bringing together 1) content knowledge and 2) pedagogical content knowledge with the impact of technology on these two dimensions. Furthermore, TPACK-analysis involves consideration about the contextual conditions contributing to how these three key dimensions interacts.

The students were introduced to the project. Research ethical considerations were made in accordance with The Swedish Research Council’s guidelines. Data comprises anonymized course materials without any information about the students; course evaluations and course assignments, the former anonymized by origin and the latter anonymized in retrospect. In the surveys, data is collected through open-question, individual surveys distributed to student teachers in three different courses at different levels in the TE-program for primary school. The open questions are highlighting possible new experiences of using digital resources as a resource in teacher education and for teaching in school. We have also analysed TE-students course assignments in which students describe their lesson plans, including the digital design, involved in their teaching design. Both the course assignments and the course evaluations has been coded according to qualitative content analysis focussing on the dimension of TPACK. The written documents was read several times in order to discern recurrent themes. After this stage of qualitative analysis, overall patterns of frequencies will be taking into account in order to relate to earlier comparable studies.

Our preliminary results (further results will be presented in August 2019) shows that student teachers tend to focus on the tools themselves and their inherent qualities. However, there are also indications of how the digital technology enables representations that highlight spatial dimensions of teaching content such as the movement of animal bodies, or three-dimensional representations of planets. One contextual setting shaping these student approaches is related to the structure and progression of the TE-program, with both possibilities and limitations for digital learning.

Our results are pointing to the need of focussing on critical aspects, i.e. the framing of teaching content and added pedagogical values, through introducing the work with digital tools and their implications for teaching content, systematically and early in the TE-programme.  The TPACK-concept involves challenges but also provides an important resource for this purpose. Our exploration intend to shed light on how this could be done in TE as earlier research also seem to confirm this challenge (Voogt & McKenney 2017).