Future and experienced teachers should collaborate on ICT integration

Abstract

School teachers of the future are coming from a new generation. This generation is fluent and even unseparated from digital devices. As representatives of a new culture, future school teachers should play a major of implementing ICT in education. Unfortunately, schools are still traditional and during Curricular Practical Training school mentors can’t share their ICT in teaching findings, because they have little or none of such experience. Thus, future teachers should be ready to develop new approaches in education and help other teachers of elder generations to take advantages of it. University educators and the authors of ICT policies should provide opportunities for future teachers to communicate with their elder colleagues as peers and form their ability to discuss practical issues about ICT in Education. To meet these needs teachers from Kherson State University have organized series of joint ICT workshops for school teachers and students of pedagogical specialties. There are many benefits from such learning format, both for students and teachers. Teachers can learn more about ICT and share their experience, get inspiration and find affinity group, to become mentors for younger colleagues. In such groups, students can communicate with more experienced colleagues, find out more about teaching methods from experts, develop a better ability to express their vision, defend their ideas, help others to create teaching content with ICT, and be proactive as professionals. The results of such learning format, typical trends and difficulties are outlined and analyzed in the paper.