Abstract:

The Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) announced “The Vision for ICT in Education” on April 28, 2011. The Vision focuses to take full advantage of the features of ICT in order to provide education to foster abilities required for children who will lead the 21st century. To meet the goal of the Vision, the Japanese Government aims to make all the teachers ICT literate. However, the results of the “Countrywide Survey on the Situations of Informatization of Japanese Schools” announced by the MEXT in July, 2011 shows that only 76.1 percent of the teachers can use ICT for class preparation, class evaluation and educational research, 61.5 percent can utilize ICT in classroom lessons, 62.3 percent can foster students’ ICT literacy, 71.4 percent can cope with moral issues in ICT, and 72.4 percent can utilize ICT for school affairs.
Fostering ICT literate teachers is a crucial factor of the quality of ICT integrated education. Therefore, the MEXT developed the “Educational Media In-service Teacher Training Curriculum Standards” in 1973. The curriculum standards has been introducing knowledge and skills required for teachers and educational staffs, and has been a reference material for regional curriculum planners in developing regional training courses. However, since more than five years have passed since the last “curriculum standards” was published in 2006, and since the situation of ICT has radically changed, it is necessary to identify teachers’ emerging needs for ICT training courses.
The purpose of this study is to identify the emerging needs for in-service teacher training courses that are related with the usage of ICT in education in Japan. A questionnaire survey was conducted on October 7th, 2011. The participants were 39 teachers and teachers’ consultants who took part in the “Media Specialists Training Course” which was held by the MEXT. Open-ended questions were used to identify the participants’ needs for teaching training courses. Participants were asked what they want to learn in an in-service teacher training course for ICT integration. Participants’ answers were classified using quantification method type III. Results of the research reveal that ICT training courses with high needs were: moral issues in education, using interactive blackboards for education, using smartphones for education, using mobile learning devices (e.g. Nintendo DS, PSP) for education, using tablets for education, using SNSs for education, using digital textbooks for education, and using ICT for school affairs.

Keywords:

In-service training, ICT integration, teacher training, needs.