Teacher Technology Education for Spatial Learning in Digital Immersive Virtual Environments

Introduction

Pedagogical information and communication technology (ICT) competence – the teachers’ ability to appropriately use technological tools in related curriculum contexts – is nowadays crucial to support educational change by leveraging ICT as a developmental booster for students’ cognitive systems. Teachers’ knowledge and skills are required according to the learning goals foreseen by different curricula, which may vary from just using technology to enhance students’ learning to the idea of starting up advanced models of ICT integration. The main shift is represented by providing customized and personalized learning for students through technological approaches and, at the same time, setting up communities of learners involved in knowledge building processes to face with real-world problems (Law, 2010).

Teachers’ knowledge, related to technology resources, has been categorized in different kinds (Hinostroza, Labbé, López, 2010) (see Table 1):

• § kind know-what – which refers to content matter knowledge, pedagogical knowledge and methodologies, knowledge of curriculum, learners’ characteristics, educational contexts, and knowledge of educational purposes;

• § nature what-knowledge – which can be divided in formal and informal knowledge, respectively gained by university studies and by learning from personal and shared experience;

• § level know-how – which focuses on teachers’ expertise development in coping with practical situations, skill acquisition in facing up under pressure routine procedures, and competence to plan ahead;

• § in practice how-to – which means learning to carry on management and support routines, and exchange routines with colleagues.

For each one of these types of knowledge, a specific foreseen technological approach is suggested (Hinostroza, Labbé, López, 2010):

• § kind know-what – useful ICT may be productivity tools and digital content resources to support teachers’ knowledge building;

• § nature what-knowledge – needed ICT are intended to enhance shared and distributed cognition, such as wikis, blogs, and social bookmarking;

• § level know-how – basic ICT should sustain communication throughout teachers’ learning community, co-creating virtual learning communities, using learning management systems, and sharing information through social networks, immediate response systems, and image sites;

• § in practice how-to – interactive ICT for exploring can be considered virtual learning environments (VLE) and virtual worlds.

Technology resources, in themselves, cannot be seen as a booster of change, just because each technological approach could collaborate to update traditional didactics. The difference between only using technology and vice versa innovating by technology is given by the educational design underlying any learning environment. Indeed, only a specific pedagogical approach may really support a dynamic process of change.

Educational technological change should then imply the re-shaping and/or the co-construction of learning models, from a theoretical and methodological point of view; the analysis of teachers’ and students’ learning needs; and the specific role played by ICT in situation, in continuous interaction with teachers’ competences in narrowing students to innovation.