Abstract:

We describe the results of a three-year activity dedicated to promoting the early adoption of ICT tools by young computer science teachers. This activity started during the last year of initial training and is still ongoing with an in-service mentoring and collaboration with a Moodle virtual community. The initial training consisted in a fifty-hour in presence course where Moodle was used to support an almost equivalent time work of on-line activities in a blended learning setting.
The first part of the course dealt with classical topics such as computer networks, system administration, relational databases and web applications. Since the very beginning, the student teachers, who had no previous experience of any LMS, got acquainted with Moodle as students. In order to raise their interest towards Moodle, the content of the on-line activities was carefully designed to support the course as well as a showcase of Moodle features and potentiality such as forums, wikis, cross-evaluation assignments, custom databases, glossaries,…
The topics of the first part of the course, curricular for any initial computer science teacher training, were also the ideal background to introduce Moodle itself and its full administration as topics of the second part of the course. The preparation done by the trainees as students allowed them to adeptly use Moodle as teachers quite soon. In fact, each of the student teachers had the opportunity to act as a teacher of a virtual classroom, where all the other trainees acted as students. As a final course assignment, the trainees were asked to turn one of the topics introduced during the first part of the course into a set of classroom and on-line Moodle activities. At the end of the course, strong and weak points of each proposal were openly discussed by the student teachers and the trainer. Some of these proposals will be presented for discussion in the poster.
When the initial teacher training course was over, the on-line classroom was turned into an open virtual community to keep in contact the (newly become) teachers and the teacher trainer, to allow further mentoring and to promote the evaluation and the exchange of teaching materials and experiences. The community also agreed to meet about once a month to discuss teaching experiences and problems, and to deepen the knowledge of topics agreed with the on-line forum.
Nowadays we have a community of about twenty young teachers, all of them relying on Moodle for their (on-line) classes and sharing experiences with the on-line class inherited from the teacher training course. These teachers involve quite satisfactorily about five hundred new students every year in their on-line classes. There are, of course, many aspects to improve, but we are very confident that this will be possible with time, passion, and experience.