Teachers have an important role in helping pupils achieve the skills needed to become digitally literate and digitally competent in today’s society. Consequently teacher education must help becoming teachers develop these skills and how to teach them. However, previous research indicates a lack of confidence among many teacher educators to do so (Enochsson & Rizza, 2009).

To acquire a deeper understanding of the challenges and opportunities teacher educators and student teachers might encounter when working with, and learning about, ICT as a tool for learning, the authors of this paper carried out a self-study research project (cf. Loughran, 2007; Zeichner, 2007) which focused on our own experiences when planning and teaching a 7,5 ECTS course in initial teacher training. The focus of the course was the pedagogical use of web 2.0-resourses to create learning objects for use in (pre-)schools.  The course could be characterized as innovative since its focus, content and form of distribution, teaching and examination goes far beyond what’s common in initial teacher training inSweden(Enochsson, 2010; Ericsson & Löndahl, 2008). Lectures, seminars and student co-operation were mainly web-based and students were encouraged to take a very high degree of responsibility for their own learning. Web-based resources specifically created for the course were offered to compensate for the scarceness of face-to-face meetings.

The fact that we both have rather different experiences of the content and the technology used in this course, and of being a teacher educator and researcher, was used as a methodological postulate for the self study project. After every seminar, lecture or examination the two of us reflected together. Sometimes non-scheduled student contacts also actuated further reflections. These reflections were recorded digitally and notes were taken. In total five hours of recordings were made at eight times. In between these collaborative reflections, personal reflections were noted and sometimes taped.

Some of the key-findings discussed in the paper are: Insights in challenges and opportunities for both teachers and students to integrate (a) content knowledge; (b) pedagogical knowledge; and (c) technological knowledge; into (d) a Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge, TPACK (see Mishra & Koehler 2006, 2008, cf. Ferdig, 2006).

How our different skills and experiences gave us a better understanding of what might be difficult or unclear to students, thus making us able to give a better course and more valid student feedback. We also identified some of the mechanism that made us, as “expert” and/or “novice”, take certain things for granted (cf. Sandretto) which in turn might make us miss students’ proximal zone of development. When co-operating closely and complementing each other skills- and experience wise, this is less likely to happen. 

Another insight was how our different proficiencies (i.e. our different understanding of technology, pedagogy and content) affected our assessment of the students’ multimodal presentations, what becomes focused, valued and assessed.

Implications for teacher education, teacher educators’ professional development, student teachers, and for (pre)school are also discussed.