Design of a teachers’ training workshop for improving technology integration skills

Abstract

Educationists and researchers recommend integration of simulations in classrooms to promote student-centric constructivist learning. The simulations need to be carefully designed toward improvement ofconceptual understanding of students. In this paper, we report on a training workshop for teachers with the specific goal of imparting simulation integration skills for classroom teaching. In the workshop, we used SEQUEL, a freely downloadable circuit simulator, and focused on electronic circuits taught typically at the second-year undergraduate level. We applied education technology principles as well as constructivist alignment methods to design the workshop. In particular, collaborative learning strategies such as think-pair-share and peer instruction were covered specifically for the intended simulation integration. Furthermore, application of the flippedclassroom model in the context of circuit simulation was explained to the participants. We report on the workshop design in detail and report the impact of the training  workshop on integration skills of the teachers. We found that teachers (N=15) perceived the workshop to be usefulin designing their aligned lesson plans. Teachers also reported their field study in which they found improved motivation of students to solve  electronics circuit problems.