Abstract:

Information and Communication Technologies are an increasingly ubiquitous component of everyday life, also having a significant impact on education. ICT offer a vast amount of pedagogical resources for teachers and have the potential to support education across almost the whole curriculum, providing opportunities for innovation and the improvement of learning processes. Technologies appropriately used and integrated could facilitate collaborative work, increase students’ motivation and engagement in some learning subjects and support the interpretation of data and the development of mental models to explain natural phenomena. Some benefits of ICT in science education are related to fact that they provide support for collaboration and inquiry activities, and offer a wide range of tools and resources to facilitate and enhance learning, such as interpretation and visualization tools, data capture devices, digital recording equipments, computer-controlled laboratory devices, virtual laboratories, multimedia software simulations and many others. Nevertheless, the use of based-computer learning objects and its effective integration into the classrooms is still a real challenge to science teaching and learning, as it has been argued by several authors.
Educational research has identified some problems and obstacles encountered by teachers when implementing ICT at school, both from a general and from a subject-specific perspective. Teachers still find many barriers related to lack of knowledge, confidence, competence and difficulty to access teaching resources for specific areas, such as science education, when they are trying to integrate ICT in their lessons. Literature reports the existence of gaps between the pedagogical content knowledge and the so called technological and pedagogical content knowledge, which teacher should have for the appropriate integration of technology into teaching practices.
Taking into consideration both, the huge potential of technology to facilitate and enhance learning, and the difficulties encountered by teachers when trying to use ICT for educational purposes, we present a work aimed at providing prospective teachers with the specialised knowledge and training, required to efficiently implement technology in science education. Particularly, we will focus on the use of simulations in inquiry-based learning environments.
The aims of this proposal are twofold: On one hand, we will give pre-service teachers the opportunity to explore the effects of simulations on science learning as students, trying to elicit their preconceptions about effective science learning. On the other hand, we will provide them with a theoretical framework to support them in making an appropriate use of technology as prospective teachers, increasing their pedagogical, technological and content knowledge for science education.

Keywords:

Simulations, pre-service teacher, science education.