Abstract:

Web 2.0 technologies that socially based technologies are becoming more popular in the everyday lives of students and teachers and capable of supporting informal conversation, reflexive dialogue and collaborative content generation, enabling access to a wide raft of ideas and representations. As a result, educators have begun to explore their use in formal education. However, teachers and pre-service teachers don’t have information about web 2.0 technologies adequately.  Therefore, researchers clustered Web 2.0 tools in regard to eight areas: social media, interactive presentation tools, online storage and file sharing tools, web authoring and collaborative tools, animation and video tools, learning management systems, online survey and testing tools, concept maps and drawing tools. Because of these social tools could be used for education for facilitate to teaching activities, authors have organized a scientific meeting about web 2.0 education for pre-service teachers and shared their experience about this meeting process. This is a kind of seminar for pre-service teachers about investigation and utilization of web 2.0 tools teaching and learning environments which is supported by TUBITAK. In this study, the participants’ views of this seminar were analyzed based on three sub-titles: educational plan in the seminar, academicians in the seminar and benefits at the end of the seminar. It is a kind of descriptive study to analyze the participants’ views about this seminar. The sample of the study consisted of 40 pre-service teachers who participated in the seminar. They were selected from 10 different departments of 17 different universities and from 3rd and 4th year undergraduate students. 9 of them are male, 31 of them are female and 13 of the participants are in the third grade and 27 of them are studying in the fourth grade. In order to collect relevant data, Activity Evaluation Survey (AES) was used. It consists of 21 questions of type 5 Likert. In addition, we also asked three open-ended questions to learn in depth what they would prefer for the program's positive and negative aspects and similar activities. According to the results, the views of pre-service teachers on the seminar were gathered under three main themes: the planning of the seminar and the training program, academicians lecturing throughout the seminar, and benefits at the end of the seminar. When the collected data were examined, it was seen that the views of the participants were very positive in all of the materials constituting the themes. Proposals for the researchers who want to organize similar seminars on the problems and observations observed by the researchers during the seminar are as follows: ·         Plan the activities to take at least three days of each activity (e.g. Interactive Presentation Tools (Prezi, SlideShare, PowToon)). This will lead to the prolongation of the duration of the seminar, which will increase the theoretical and practical consideration of a chosen topic. ·         If the participants are working in different disciplines, such as teachers or pre-service teachers, the participants will be selected from a few areas and the training of example practices directly in these areas will make the training more effective. ·         Additional activities should be included in group work in an area-specific training that can be done over a longer period of time.

Keywords: