Digital Literacy Profiles of Pre-Service Preschool Teachers

With the rapid development and spread of technology, the ways in which people reach knowledge, produce knowledge and share information have altered significantly. According to We are Social’s (2016) research on the digital ecosystem of countries, the number of active internet users in Turkey increased from 46.28 million to 48 million in 2017 (We are Social, 2017). While in 2016, people in Turkey have spent an average daily screen time of four hours and 14 minutes on technological devices, such as tablets and smart phones, this number has increased to seven hours in 2017 (We are Social, 2016; 2017). The public’s growing interaction with technological devices has also led to changes in ways of accessing information and literacy. The informatics era requires the use of digital literacy skills not only in work and education settings, but also in daily life. Various definitions have been made for the concept of digital literacy skills. According to the conceptual framework proposed by Ng (2012, p. 1067), digital literacy skills are comprised of three dimensions: (a) technical (the ability to use information and communication technological tools effectively); (b) cognitive (the ability to access, critically assess and produce knowledge in the digital environment), (c) socio-emotional (the ability to communicate through digital environment, and to sustain various activities such as learning). In the future, teacher candidates will provide education to children who have opened their eyes to a world with today’s technology in it and, therefore, who are called digital natives. The digital literacy skills of pre-service teachers are regarded as important to investigate—both for the integration of informatics and communication technologies to their future classes, and for providing teacher training programs information aimed at increasing digital literacy skills. Therefore, in this study, the digital literacy skills and digital reading habits of preschool teacher candidates have been examined. Participants of the study are pre-service teachers who are enrolled at the Departments of Early Childhood Education of five state universities in the spring semester of the 2017–2018. The data will be collected via both the Digital Literacy Scale (Ng, 2012), which has been adapted to Turkish by Üstündağ, Güneş, and Bahçıvan (2017) and the demographic information form. The findings of the study will be discussed within the context of the literatur