Abstract:

Teachers have to renew their teaching methods for aligning them to the needs of students of the new generations. They have to find new ways of information presentation making it more interesting, motivating and understandable. Technology provides wonderful and smart tools for this work. Virtual reality (VR) environments and applications bring big changes in many fields such as information systemization and presentation, motivation, creativity. In this research we examined the change of the behavior and working methods of teacher training students (on computer science teacher training) during their work in our VR laboratory. We used several situations and gave various tasks: developing curricula, collaborating with their colleagues, planning their students’ collaborations. We examined whether (a) the VR environments can increase their creativity, (b) they involve the new possibilities provided by the new working space in their work and in their teaching methods, and if they do. How they change their ideas about the teaching methods, (c) they use this space for collaboration and communication in their work outside the classroom, and if they do how they use it. In this paper we present the most interesting and important results of this research. We found that the VR increased their motivation on specific areas where they wanted to use VR in their work inside and outside the classrooms. We present how they started to use the VR spaces and what kind of services they apply, how they creativity was affected. We found that there are some areas that avoided their attentions.

Keywords:

Virtual reality, teachers' collaboration, teacher training, online education.