The Development of College Instructors’ Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge

The ministry of education is launching an overall project to implement the use of ICT in the Israeli higher education institutes, as well as in the elementary through high schools. In the 2011-2012 academic year. Al-Qasemi Academic College of Education was chosen to receive support from the ministry of education to participate in this project. The project goals are to facilitate the ICT integration into teaching on all its aspects; i.e. facilities and instructors. The goal of the research was to accompany the implementation of the college plan and intervention, especially the steps which the college carried out regarding the instructors’ preparation and support, with a research that primarily examines the development of the instructors’ TPACK (technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge) and its various components, in addition to the instructors’ attitudes toward computers and instructors’ ICT proficiency. For this purpose we translated to Arabic and modified existing questionnaires developed by the MOFET institute and by previous researches. The findings of the research indicate that instructors and pedagogical supervisors in Al-Qasemi Academic College of Education had relatively high positive attitudes toward computers before the college intervention. These attitudes did not change significantly after the intervention. The instructors’ ICT proficiency improved significantly after the college intervention especially as a result of three components of this intervention: ICT center support, participation in workshop and availability of assistants. The TPACK level of the instructors and the pedagogical supervisors, improved after the college intervention. Another major change occurred in the number of pedagogical initiatives that involve special use of ICT in teaching proposed by the pedagogical supervisors, going up from only one before the college plan to at least six initiatives this year. Moreover, the number of WBLE (web based learning environments) constructed by the pedagogical supervisors and presenting ICT based learning units that they developed by themselves or with their students in the practical training increased from only two at the beginning of the college intervention to over thirty toward the end.