Abstract
Mobile devices are now a part of everyday life whether it is mobile phones, media players or hand held computers. This small-scale study examines the extent to which secondary school geography trainee teachers made use of a hand held computer during their PGCE course. Each trainee teacher was allocated a university loaned Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) in order to assess firstly, its usefulness in supporting the trainee’s organisation, learning and teaching during the PGCE course and secondly, the pedagogical potential of using PDAs with geography classes... Drawn from the data, a number of factors which influenced the trainees' use of the PDAs are discussed. These include the functionality of the PDA, the preferred familiarity of alternative digital hardware, the intensity of a PGCE course, the school and university environments. This work in progress raises important questions for teachers and teacher educators about how trainee teachers are introduced to and experience mobile digital technologies during a PGCE course.
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