The study aims to investigate pre-service teachers’ perceptions towards Web 2.0 applications. Although the literature reveals that technology integration is a trend in higher education and researchers and educators have increasingly shared their ideas and examples of implementations of Web 2.0 applications in educational domains, few studies have focused on understanding whether pre-service teachers perceive Web 2.0 applications as effective teaching and learning tools. This study attempts to investigate to what extent computer attitude, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and using experience of Web 2.0 predict the intention to use Web 2.0 applications in future teaching among pre-service teachers.
A quantitative research method was used in the study and a paper-and-pencil questionnaire was conducted. A total of 125 participants from the teacher preparation program in a large Midwestern university were analyzed through the statistical method, multiple regression.
The multiple regression analysis rejected the null hypothesis and showed that computer attitude, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and using experience of Web 2.0 are significant predictors of the dependent variable, behavioral intention to use Web 2.0. Approximately 71% of the variance of the behavioral intention to use Web 2.0 can be accounted for by the linear relationship of the four independent variables. Three of the independent variables, perceived usefulness, computer attitude, and using experience of Web 2.0, are statistically significant in predicting the behavioral intention to use Web 2.0.