Developing an Online Classroom Simulation to Support a Pre-Service Teacher Education Program

Abstract

Evaluations of our pre-service teacher education program identified a need to provide more classroom based experience for our students. This motivated us to embark on the journey of developing an on-line classroom simulation. The establishment of a team and the different areas of expertise we brought to the project resulted in a theoretically sound response to this challenge. In this chapter we share some of our insights from our experiences over the past three years working on this project. In particular we focus on the key stages in the development of the software, the roles we assumed and the lessons we learned.