The Perception and Level of Digital Citizenship on Pre-Service Classroom Teachers

Abstract

This study was aimed to determine of their perceptions and levels of digital citizenship for pre-service classroom teachers. The study was conducted with 76 senior pre-service classroom teachers at Education Faculty of B. U. The study is survey research. In this research, “The Digital Citizenship Scale” developed by Kocadağ (2012) was applied to the pre-service classroom teachers. By using open-ended questions that prepared by researchers, it was interviewed with the same students in order to making in-depth review. To determine digital citizenship levels, the frequencies, percentages, arithmetic means and standard deviations of obtained data were interpreted on the table. The data from the interviews were carried out with content analysis, which is one of the qualitative analysis methods, and had been interpreted. As a result, pre-service classroom teachers had been stated that they had no courses related with digital citizenship and its sub-dimensions during their higher education. Nevertheless, it has been found that they were correctly expressed the concept of digital citizenship. Pre-service classroom teachers have indicated that digital technologies were particularly utilized to aimed for online shopping, entering to social networking and researching of homework assignments in courses. Digital citizenship includes nine sub-dimensions that every individual should have in today’s world. The classroom teachers, that play a key role in the training of the individuals must have been trained themselves by qualified properties before the beginning of their career. It is thought that this study might be leading to further studies by training on knowledge, ability and values about digital citizenship before beginning of their service to classroom teachers.