The Role of Visual Tools and a Virtual Learning Environment in Student Teachers’ Internship

Abstract

The relevance of this work is conditioned by the important role and aims of a teaching internship within the framework of student teachers' training. The use of a virtual learning environment requires a comprehensive experimental evaluation and may contribute to the resolution of a number of problems which are specific to the teaching internship. The article deals with the evaluation of an educational process implemented outside the university, and this evaluation must be performed with regard to multi-tiered interaction between the participants of educational process. The main theses of this research may be correlated with the stages of planning and undergoing of teaching internships. The following tools are used during development of the motivational and axiological basis of internships, the stage of its implementation, and subsequent self-assessment: a set of videos (which summarize selected topics) created by senior students when they were undertaking similar internships; simple graphic instructions which allow students to plan and undergo their internship effectively, write an internship report, and create and attach videos to their reports; expert analytical forms necessary to assess the course of internship and its results. The research included a survey among student teachers who were asked to identify difficult aspects of internship's planning and implementation in a specifically created collective environment for research data with the use of the following means: creation of collective questionnaires, visual representation of the tabulated survey data, and statistical analysis with the use of summarized tables. Based on the analysis of the work results of student teachers who have already done their internship and acquired the experience of educational process planning, the major issues were identified and described and visual tools for overcoming these issues were tested. The article describes an approach that helps student teachers overcome the barriers between existing visual educational tools within their training and insufficient orientation of school internships towards these tools' effective application in higher education. The methods of students' motivation for self-education and their implementation during the teaching internship were experimentally assessed in this research.