Putting pre-service teachers first

One of the recommended principles for classroom practice from the Digital Rhetorics Project is "teachers first", emphasising the need to prioritise the needs of teachers in learning new technologies and understanding their relationship to literacy education (Lankshear, Green, & Snyder, 2000), p.121). While most of my pre-service English Education students use digital technologies for their own purposes and understand the benefits of doing so, it is not always straightforward as to how technology can be effectively utilised in their classroom and for what purposes. This paper reports on work conducted with pre-service English Education teachers in an elective unit that focuses upon digital technologies in secondary classrooms. Using Green's 3D model of literacy as a way of understanding the complex interrelationships between the cultural, critical and operational aspects of literacy, the students experiment with digital technologies such as mobile phones, wikis and blogs.