As economies around the world become increasingly knowledge-based, competencies in ICT for active citizenship and across the workforce are becoming progressively more crucial for a prosperous society (UNESCO, 2011: 6f). Teachers are integrating ICT in formal education (McKnight, O’Malley, Ruzic, Horsley, Franey & Bassett, 2016), helping to incorporate those technologies in learning. Indeed, an important contributor to effective teachers’ ICT competencies in the classroom is Initial Teacher Education in Teacher Training Institutions (TTIs) (Tondeur, van Braak, Siddiq & Scherer, 2016). There is increasing interest in the role of Initial Teacher Educators, in developing ICT skills and competencies in pre-service teachers (Haydn, 2010; Hammond, Crosson, Fragkouli, Ingram, Johnston-Wilder, Johnston-Wilder, et al., 2009; Gudmundsdottir & Hatlevik, 2018). However, the state of play relating to the development of such skills is not widely knowing.
Using a convergent mixed methods design that consisted of a series of interviews with Initial Teacher Educators as well as a series of questionnaires that were distributed to higher education institutions across the island; this paper examines how far these ‘models’ or paradigms were evidenced in the practice of TEs. We considered how TEs cope with the challenges and expectations of incorporating ICT into their teaching and their preparation of their students, who are all pre-service teachers, for teaching placements and, eventually, employment. By way of association, we also examined how TEs manage their own technological and pedagogical development and their motivations for developing ICT skills in their students. Findings suggest that while there are certainly pockets of excellence and some individual models of good practice, it is also clear that there is a limited coherent integration of ICT within and across the TTIs studied, despite efforts to achieve this.