Abstract:

This paper discusses the role of blended learning in Teacher Education on a Graduate Program in Physical Education at Sport Faculty of Porto University. The paper is a case study focuses on students’ experiences of using a number of on-line tools and strategies presented in Scholar Pedagogy courses. The balance between online and face-to-face components will vary for every module of the course.
As our students are student-teachers, this experience is particularly relevant and equips them to make use of educational technology in their professional future, improving their knowledge, skills and ability to reflect their practice.
This study reports at 2007/08 academic year, and data were collected from the on-line activity of the 143 students in Scholar Pedagogy courses. We used an e-learning platform (WebCT) as a complement to face-to-face courses, to increase students’ participation in the construction of learning contents and improve their responsibility in their own learning process.
In this communication we will examines the educational potential of tools that resulted in the evolution of the Web paradigm for Web 2.0 and discussing their potential in Teaching Education. In Scholar Pedagogy on-line course we have use almost every tool of the WebCT platform: Announcements, E-mail (182 messages sent and 22 messages received), Assignments (105 documents produced by students), Forum Discussions (408 messages posted and 3235 visits), Grade Book and Assessments. There are registered 28.398 on-line sessions during 907:22:58 hours of total time on-line.
Students have generally expressed positive views about their experiences on the blended learning component of the course. Negative views have tended to be in the minority and often are due with technical’s problems.
This study suggest that blended learning can play an important role in teachers education programs in Physical Education, and we believe that the use of ICT such blended learning environments will improve their ability to reflect and link theory with practice.

Keywords:

teacher education, blended-learning, educational technology.