Teaching in the Knowledge Society: New Skills and Instruments for Teachers

In this book, together with well known hypotheses on the influence of ICT on education and the attempt of finding and defining a pedagogy of ICT, special perspectives for the analysis of that phenomenon are adopted, to better describe the context teachers, tutors and all actors involved in teaching-learning process are immersed in: - first of all three different levels of intervention for the ICTs on knowledge construction are recognized and proposed for the discussion: subject, community/organization and society; - secondly the reference frame teachers/professors are immersed in is analyzed and the changes on their ways of working are discussed, - thirdly the experiences some authors are carrying out with their students are reported; two main points of view emerge: the former one looks at the ICT as the instrument for overcoming students’ difficulties and/or helping them in obtaining better performances; the latter one is mostly concerned with the review of already known teaching/learning theories strongly modified by the intervention of ICT, and on the suggestion of new teaching-learning environments and scenarios, - furthermore, hypotheses for the reorganization of teaching work, and more generally for the analysis and restructuring of educational environments and settings, are not missing, - at last some instruments and strategies for teaching are reported. If the role of the ICT is very important in all chapters of the book not less important is the way information is managed by them and especially: a) the information/knowledge spread by means of new technologies, b) the actors of teaching/learning and educational process and their interaction with technologies, c) the places and times involved in the use of ICT in educational contexts. The above perspectives instantiate in six different sections. The first analyzes the changes induced by ICT on the ways of knowing and learning. In the second section the analysis of the environments where teachers and professors are involved in is discussed. The third section focuses on students’ success in e-learning and distance education courses and on the use of ICT for improving teaching-learning success. The fourth section is mostly concerned with students’ environments management and with strategies to be adopted from teachers in well settled theoretic contexts, with the help of ICT . The fifth section proposes ICT solutions for the use of special virtual environments devoted to teaching/learning. The sixth and last section discusses two different kinds of resources teachers must include in their pedagogy: Web and its transformation in semantic Web and media selection for better results in teaching.