"עושים גלים" – מעקב אחר אנשי חינוך שהשתתפו בפרויקט "כיתה מתוקשבת חושבת"

In the present research we sought to examine the effect of the participation of student teachers in the laptop project "A Thinking IT Classroom", on their mode of employing ICT in their actual work as school and kindergarten teachers. The project was implemented in two colleges of education between 1995 and 2002. The research, which was conducted in 2009, focused on 92 of the graduates of one of the colleges: 57 of them were graduates of the project, and constituted the experimental group, and 35 were graduates with similar characteristics who had not participated in the project, and served as the control group. The research was conducted by means of quantitative and qualitative methodologies, and its findings revealed a small number of significant differences between the project graduates and the control group. After teaching for approximately ten years, the project graduates characterized themselves as integrating ICT into teaching to a greater extent than the control group. Consistent with the research literature, it was found that the project graduates remembered more about the lecturers' modeling of the integration of ICT into their courses than their colleagues. In addition, the project graduates were more obviously directed to experiment with building ICT applications and implementing them in the classrooms. Some of the project graduates influenced the culture of ICT use in the educational institution in which they worked. In this article we focus on presenting some of the research findings that we consider to be the most important components that should be applied during teacher education courses.