Have Irish Pre-Service Teachers Crossed the Digital Divide?.
For many years there has been a perception that people entering the teaching profession in Ireland were less “techy” than many of their college counterparts. If this is still true, it has worrying implications for the use of technology in schools and hence for the education of the next generation of students. This paper investigates the level of technology awareness of pre-service elementary teachers (“Education students”) in a university in Ireland, and compares it to that of students taking Economics courses in the university. The work is set in the context of recent policy developments in IT for Irish schools. The findings suggest that first-year Education students report less experience of IT in their schools, and also have lower levels of awareness and use of IT in their personal lives, than do first-year Economics students, though the results are less clear-cut when only the females in each group are compared.
