Page 214 - Štremfel, Urška, and Maša Vidmar (eds.). 2018. Early School Leaving: Training Perspectives. Ljubljana: Pedagoški inštitut.
P. 214
work, how to communicate with students, how to deal with discipline
incidents etc., MyTeachingPartner concentrates on teachers’ effective inter-
actions with students, while SecondChanceEducation.eu aims to support
educators working with ESL by highlighting communication, managing
conflicts and connecting the education and work environments. Therefore,
the scope and complexity covered by the different online programmes and
platforms is very comprehensive and the required educators’ competencies
are even more so. Accordingly, the choice of a professional development
programme for educators is complex.
The support provided by online or other ICT-supported profession-
al development programmes can help trainees improve their understand-
ing of the complex teaching know-how and improve their ability to analyse
their own activities. But this link generally remains implicit during their
formal training and, for the time being, evaluators must settle for postu-
lating that users will engage in a self-analysis that will be useful to them, if
not for acting directly then at least for recognising the corresponding pro-
fessional situations in the field (Leblanc & Ria, 2013). An important con-
sideration for the designers of new platforms is thus to establish a system
that makes the choice of programme easier by trying to encourage main-
taining the use of the newly acquired competencies even after completing
the initial course and to provide trainees with an opportunity to return to
the platform for learning on another issue they are interested in. Therefore,
each platform should be complex and flexible regarding both the contents
and methods used but at the same time easy to comprehend and use.
The greatest challenges and points to consider when developing new
platforms are: a) to be user-friendly; b) to provide tasks in such a way that
participants cooperate/collaborate with each other and with a mentor or
coach; c) to incorporate contents that are interesting and attractive to the
participants; d) to include face-to-face interaction; e) another issue that
could be resolved by including a skilled trainer is how to reach profession-
als who are not interested in using ICT; and f) establishing a system to
maintain use of newly acquired competencies even after completing the in-
itial course and for the return of participants to learn about other topics.
When addressing those issues, the developers of online platforms (such as
those being developed by the TITA project) should create platforms that
will address current issues, such as ESL, but will also have the potential to
focus on different issues when the need arises.
214
incidents etc., MyTeachingPartner concentrates on teachers’ effective inter-
actions with students, while SecondChanceEducation.eu aims to support
educators working with ESL by highlighting communication, managing
conflicts and connecting the education and work environments. Therefore,
the scope and complexity covered by the different online programmes and
platforms is very comprehensive and the required educators’ competencies
are even more so. Accordingly, the choice of a professional development
programme for educators is complex.
The support provided by online or other ICT-supported profession-
al development programmes can help trainees improve their understand-
ing of the complex teaching know-how and improve their ability to analyse
their own activities. But this link generally remains implicit during their
formal training and, for the time being, evaluators must settle for postu-
lating that users will engage in a self-analysis that will be useful to them, if
not for acting directly then at least for recognising the corresponding pro-
fessional situations in the field (Leblanc & Ria, 2013). An important con-
sideration for the designers of new platforms is thus to establish a system
that makes the choice of programme easier by trying to encourage main-
taining the use of the newly acquired competencies even after completing
the initial course and to provide trainees with an opportunity to return to
the platform for learning on another issue they are interested in. Therefore,
each platform should be complex and flexible regarding both the contents
and methods used but at the same time easy to comprehend and use.
The greatest challenges and points to consider when developing new
platforms are: a) to be user-friendly; b) to provide tasks in such a way that
participants cooperate/collaborate with each other and with a mentor or
coach; c) to incorporate contents that are interesting and attractive to the
participants; d) to include face-to-face interaction; e) another issue that
could be resolved by including a skilled trainer is how to reach profession-
als who are not interested in using ICT; and f) establishing a system to
maintain use of newly acquired competencies even after completing the in-
itial course and for the return of participants to learn about other topics.
When addressing those issues, the developers of online platforms (such as
those being developed by the TITA project) should create platforms that
will address current issues, such as ESL, but will also have the potential to
focus on different issues when the need arises.
214
