Like a (School of) fish in water (or ICT-enhanced skills in action)

Abstract

The paper presents pilot experiences related to an educational methodology developed within the European Innovative Teacher (I*Teach) project for building ICT-enhanced skills [1]. The methodology is presented in the context of a workshop for teachers in mathematics and informatics with a special focus on enhancing presentation skills. The authors share their experience in treating the very workshop as a project with specific stages - analyzing the audience's interests, developing a presentation scenario around a leading metaphor in harmony with the setting, distributing different roles among the presenters, involving the audience in an active reasoning and sharing. Thus the workshop has demonstrated at a meta-level how the collective intelligence of teachers could be harnessed in action. The main message is: such an approach makes teachers feel like co-creators of the I*Teach project́s ideas and teachers need only a bit of praise or encouragement to recognize themselves as innovative teachers. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.