Teachers’ professional development in a Virtual Educational Environment: Some Features of Design and Implementation

The article deals with the experience of training courses for teachers of secondary schools in a virtual educational environment. The courses are aimed at the development of information competence of teachers, as well as their methodical competence in the field of tutoring of schoolchild’s educational-research activity. This is due to the acute need for the formation and development of students’ personal qualities needed for life and work in today’s information society, as the ability to formulate the problem, identify the purpose of the activity, set goals to achieve it, specifically search for information, analyze and interpretation it in accordance with the goal and objectives. Effective means of formation at pupils of these qualities is the organization of extra-curricular research activities. This form of organization of the educational process has been well studied and widely distributed. The course of a research project carried out within a cycle of actions corresponds to the cycle of a scientific research - from identifying problems till the result publication. Contests of research projects give to the students an additional motivation to participate in research activities. In modern conditions a specific feature of a research is that much of it takes place in an open information space by means of modern information and communication technologies. The author identifies three groups of competencies that a teacher must possess for successful management of a research team of students: the organizer of work and a consultant; scientific director; IT-specialist; he/she divides these into three areas of activity of the teacher in terms of training in educational network defined by I. Illich. As the previous research showed, most teachers do not have the combination of these competences in a degree sufficient for effective management of students’ research in an open information space. Based on these considerations, we proposed a system of tasks associated with the organization and conduct of the distance contest of school research projects. The tasks were performed in the course of their daily teaching activities in real school groups. The main methodological features of courses developed by the author are full remote communication between trainees and tutors, the constant interactivity, and integration with daily professional activities. The author describes the program of the courses, some features of its implementation and the results of the studies. In conclusion, the author argues that the developed method is more effective in comparison with traditional, including involving remote interaction.

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