Abstract:

As teaching in not a static but a progressing, continuous and lifelong process and, as the quality of teachers is the key for effective learning, in-service teachers need to participate in continuous training.

In-service teacher continuous training can, in few words, be defined as the set of activities that will improve and update in-service teachers' professional knowledge, skills, and competences.
In Portugal, in-service teachers are required to undertake continuous training. Training actions take different forms such as: training courses, training workshops, study circles, short-term actions or, at the request of the Scientific and Pedagogical Council for Continuing Education (CCPFC), internships and projects.

Since 1997 in the institution where I work, we organize, in a joint organization with the Centre Regional Delegation of the Portuguese Mathematical Society
(SPM-Centro), in a regular basis, the "MatViseu", a meeting for Portuguese in-service teachers. The main purpose of "MatViseu" is to respond to the needs of updating and deepening the knowledge/skills of mathematics in-service teachers from elementary to secondary school.

In the last years I’ve been invited to dynamize workshops at "MatViseu" and I proposed the following workshops (in different years):
1. MAXIMA free software applications.
2. GeoGebra 3D Graphic Sheet, a space for new experiences.
3. Preparation of online forms and tests with Google Forms.
4. Active learning in mathematics with using digital tools.

At the first workshop was used MAXIMA (a free and complete computer algebra system), in second GeoGebra (a dynamic mathematics software), in third Google Forms and in fourth Mentimeter, Google Docs, Nearpod and Desmos.

The three first workshops were in-person but the last one was remote because the pandemic situation in 2020. In these workshops there were always two particular concerns from my side: one is to use free software/platforms, because I believe that with free software/platforms it's easier to implement in different type of schools and the other is to share some ideas and simple strategies to implement free software/platforms in classroom in order to make them more dynamic and interactive for teachers and/or students.

On each workshop, as they are hands-on, there were a maximum of 32 teachers.

The appropriate use of software in mathematics classes can, on one side be greatly useful to gather student's questions to exercises and on the other side can offer valuable support to provide and make clearer some mathematical concepts.

At the end of each “MatViseu” edition in-service teachers need to make a report about each workshop and the feedback about these proposed workshops are very positive. Moreover, some of the teachers were participants in more than one of the workshops and when I asked if they implemented some of ideas of a previous workshop, they answers were positive. Even more, during training workshops, some of the teachers went beyond the proposed activities and create their own activities adapted to contents they teach.

In this paper, for one hand, some of the workshop’s activities and ideas to implement them in the classroom will be presented and, for the other hand, will be mentioned few comments from in-service teachers who have been present.

Keywords:

Teacher training, mathematics, tecnologies, digital tools, active learning.