Pre-Service Elementary Teachers' Beliefs about Use of the Internet in the Social Studies Classroom

Source: European Journal of Teacher Education, Volume 32, Issue 3, p. 305-320 (August 2009).

The Internet has become one of the most common instructional tools because of recent developments in telecommunications and Internet technology. Accordingly, educators increasingly support the use of the Internet in the social studies classroom. Thus, the purpose of this study was to investigate pre-service elementary teachers' beliefs about the use of the Internet in the social studies classroom.
Data were collected through an open-ended questionnaire from 37 pre-service elementary teachers in a large Turkish university. An inductive analysis approach was used to analyze the data. Thus, the emergent patterns of the data were used to develop coding categories.
The data analysis indicated that the majority of the participants supported the use of the Internet in the social studies classroom, while they acknowledged the disadvantages and negative aspects of the use of the Internet.