Abstract:

We report on a four-year activity dedicated to promote the early adoption of ICT tools by young computer science teachers. The activity started in 2006 during the last year of initial teacher training and is still ongoing with in-service mentoring and collaboration using a Moodle virtual community.
The initial training consisted of a fifty-hour in presence course where Moodle was used to support an almost equivalent time of online activities in a blended learning setting. The first part of the course dealt with classical Computer Science topics such as computer networks, system administration, relational databases and web applications. The student teachers, who had no previous experience with any LMS, soon became acquainted with Moodle as students. Moreover, in order to raise their interest in the platform, the online activities were carefully designed to both support the course and as a “showcase” of almost all Moodle features and potentiality. The first part of the teacher training course also provided the ideal background to introduce Moodle and its administration as the main topics of the second part of the course, where each student had the opportunity to learn and practice being the “teacher” of a virtual classroom, where all the other trainees acted as “students”.
When the teacher training course was over, the online classroom was turned into an open virtual community to keep the new teachers and the teacher trainer in touch and to allow further mentoring. Nowadays we have a community of about twenty young teachers, all of them relying on Moodle for their classes. A dedicated server hosts all their courses and a special Moodle role allows them to create new courses, teach them, aggregate new colleagues and to share teaching materials and experiences. These teachers enrol quite satisfactorily about a hundred new students every year in their online classes.

Keywords:

Pre-service and in-service teacher training.