Abstract:

The major goal of the internship which is based on observation and reflection principles is not to transfer and receive information. It highlights the perception and activity of the students, as they autonomously construct, acquire their practical knowledge. Together with their mentor future teachers become responsible for the content of the studies, which is closely related to educator’s daily life and experience the results of which might be monitored with the help of e-diary. The use of e-diary during the pedagogical internship based on experiential learning concept emphasizes learning as an individual knowledge which has been acquired on a personal, emotionally loaded experience basis. E-diary may be regarded as the system of learning tools, which is supposed to create the opportunities to go systematically through all experiential learning stages: observation and identification of the experienced situation; reflective assessment of the activity and the change in practical activity. The analysis of the situations recorded in the e-diary should enable future teachers to identify the events that inspire their personal development tendencies and to forecast the changes in personal professional behaviour. Reacting to the experiences, recorded in the e-diary, the mentor encourages reflection practice, directed towards searching for alternative solutions and foreseeing possibilities of changes in a specific situation of a professional activity. The diary as part of the practical tasks had to be written regularly on a weekly basis (for a total of 22 weeks). The students were consulted by the teachers working in that program.

The thematic analysis, as a research method, of the notes in e-diary has been conducted according to the following three aspects: emotional, cognitive and the change in practical activity. The database created on e-diary basis contains 1600 situations of practical pedagogical activities, produced by 64 future teachers during 2021 – 2022. The data presented in the article are general for the whole group of research participants. The research question – What kind of experiences when applying e-diary during the internship are revealed and how do they transform into the deliberate activity system? Research object – experience of the application of e-diary.

The analysis of the research findings demonstrate that the e-diary allows future teachers to collect very natural data by taking instant information. For this reason the e-diary might be regarded as a functional tool for retrieving pedagogical curriculum data and situations. Another positive feature of e-diary is that it is possible to submit not only documents and texts for analysis, but also photos and visual samples. Thus, the e-diary, as an independent learning tool, can also become a methodological tool and a special technique for researching and capturing educational processes in a specific research field. The major advantages of e-diary noted by the students are: enabling to record the experienced emotions and analyse them, to observe the changes in profession growth. Still the negative aspects of the e-diary were noted as well. E-dairy, as a learning tool, is not acceptable for all students as it is not always pleasant to recall embarrassing situations, nor to feel and describe dissatisfaction or disappointment.

Keywords:

Future teachers, internship, e-diary.