Special attention is given to provide training opportunities to (under)graduate students in the EU (Bologna Declaration, 1999). Thus, the internship period has gained official recognition in all EU university degrees to guarantee enough duration and a place to carry out specific professional preparation. Consequently, preservice teachers’ practical experiences are also gaining momentum in the teaching education programs across Europe. In view of its importance, there is a need to find common ways to design, implement, and evaluate the practicum programs within the EU, not only to share common guidelines but also to set rigorous indicators of what might constitute the learned professional experience in schools.
Secondly, there is an urgency to foster the use of ICT and online teachers’ resources to improve the learning processes. The practicum requires to be updated according to this EU strategic plan by embedding and prioritizing ICT in the teacher education programs. To date, the teaching practicum is still highly dependent on a presence-based modality. In fact, the COVID-19 pandemic has recently put universities to the test to find online solutions for face-to-face teaching. Nonetheless, major challenges have been spotlighted in the practicum as it is the only subject that has been cancelled -or postponed- in many teaching programs worldwide because of its supervised application nature.
PRAC3 would be a pioneer initiative to test the efficacy of an online teaching practicum. Today’s operational online resources aiming at bringing in the ICT in the practicum are based on the web 2.0 (theoretical contents online, users’ interaction via forums, blogs, social websites, etc). However, the ultimate motivation for this consortium is to design integrated online teaching resources for the on-site school teaching training based on web 3.0, which its defining feature is the possibility to access more personalized information according to the user’s experience (e.g., Elaboration of mentors’ and preservice students’ profiles, and virtual personalized school practices).
The relevance and necessity of an online teacher practicum is recognized globally as a key indicator of future professional performance. PRAC3 is a European initiative aimed at designing technological products and solutions for the online practicum to be used by mentors and pre-service teachers in the participant countries. Its usability will be based upon two major aspects: a management resource and a professional exchange interface for practice. For the first aspect, the tool will help to globally administrate the schools’ network available for the practicum in each participant country, to visualize the collective agreements between the universities-schools- educational authorities and select the optimal mentors for the preservice teachers according to designed professional features. In relation to the second purpose, the PRAC3 will allow pre-service teachers to become immersed in the practicum experience through simulated teaching (e.g., Augmented Reality) and virtual practices (e.g., face-to-face teaching or Live Remote Classroom System -LRCS-) which, in turn, will allow for more capacity building and teaching accessibility as well as understanding different school contexts and environments.
PRAC3 will cluster several online resources to optimize the management of tasks typically related to teacher education training and to the school-based experiences. For instance, websites, Apps, Augmented Reality hardware and software, and bidirectional simultaneous communication systems through LRCS. Its technological solutions can be summarized in the following:

1. Identifying and matching professional and training profiles: The practicum Profiles Tool (PPT). Users’ online registration and automatically profiling the pairs or dyads of mentors and preservice teachers according to an agreed-upon set of evaluation standards (e.g., managerial, pedagogical and professional criteria) will be one of its most innovative feature.
2. Promoting virtual and online practicum experiences. The preservice teachers participating in this innovative pilot initiative will be offered special online teaching training by using of:
   1. Augmented Reality (AR) simulations and real-classroom scenarios; 2.2. A Live Remote Classroom System (LRCS); and 2.3. An online Digital Repository (DR) with recorded situations of practice to be analyzed. The student teachers can reflect upon a variety of paths and teaching actions that ultimately might lead to different outcomes (e.g., e-portfolios).
3. Establish a system of online indicators that facilitates the mentor teachers’ evaluation of their preservice teachers’ practice. Our aim is to create a set of common teaching standards for all participant countries in this project that could serve as seed criteria for future European Professional Standards for Teachers.

Program Erasmus+
Call: 2020
Key action: Strategic Partnerships for Higher Education (Key Action 226)

PROJECT REFERENCE NUMBER: 2020-1-ES01-KA226-HE-096120
OID: E10208679
INSTITUTION: UNIVERSIDAD DE SALAMANCA
PROJECT TITLE: DIGITAL PRACTICUM 3.0: EXPLORING AUGMENTED REALITY, REMOTE CLASSROOMS, AND VIRTUAL LEARNING TO ENRICH AND EXPAND PRESERVICE TEACHER EDUCATION PREPARATION

FUNDING: 170.231,00 €
TYPE: Desarrollo e innovación

Project Start Date: 2021-06-01
Project Total Duration: 24 months
Project End Date: 2023-05-31

3.1. European partners.

• E10174358 PANEPISTIMIO THESSALIAS Greece
• E10212713 STICHTING ZUYD HOGESCHOOL Netherlands
• E10209369 UNIVERSITETET I BERGEN Norway
• E10209514 UNIVERSIDADE DO MINHO Portugal
• E10208679 UNIVERSIDAD DE SALAMANCA Spain

3.2. Associate partners

• ROYAL MELBOURNE INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, RMIT (AUSTRALIA)
• UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (CANADA)
• UNIVERSITY OF HAIFA (ISRAEL)

The main objective is to design an online tool for teachers and student teachers to access more personalized information according to the users’ experience. It will be named the Practicum Profiles Tool (PPT). The absence of face-to-face meetings and interviews during the COVID-19 pandemic spotlights the need for a full online management tool for the practicum.
The core idea aims at developing profiles both for teaching (professional profile) and learning (training profile) the profession. The means to do it will be by choosing the best dyads or triads for the practicum according to mentors’ professional features (professional profile) and student teachers’ learning needs (training profile). Teacher mentoring is highly dependent on contexts of practice and multiple human interactions.

Improving the teaching process during the practicum would imply the selection and production of innovative content in virtual spaces. First: Augmented Reality (AR) classroom simulated scenarios will be designed and prioritized. Second: an operational Live Remote Classroom System (LRCS) will be activated and provided to the participants. Third, we will collect good teaching practices from the practicum experience to construct a Digital Repository (DR).

We aim to create a set of common assessment indicators that facilitate school mentors and faculty advisors the student teachers’ evaluation at training in both face-to-face and online environments.
Indicators play a fundamental role in modern societies and constitute an essential resource for Teacher Educators, policymakers, leaders and the general public. “They support evidence-based decision making, allow comparisons over time, between policies, countries and regions, social groups and industries, and contribute to increased transparency and accountability” (EUROSTAT, 2017, p.5). In short, they condense complex information, as driving signals do, into a comprehensive scheme that helps to assess it. To accomplish this purpose, the indicators should ‘fit for purpose’ and meet quality requirements.

The main goal of the workshop is to convey the significant results of the PRAC project that prove to have positive effects on practice: The Practicum Profiles Tool, testing the AR simulations, and Digital Repository cases.

The target audiences of this event will be policymakers and regional educational administrations in the COUNTRY, Teaching Unions representatives and other educational stakeholders. Attendees will be provided with the credentials to access the Practicum Profiles Tool and free access to the AR simulations.

Dedicated team members from the faculty of education at EACH UNIVERSITY will

• randomly select the primary education teachers and student teachers to discuss in teams the technologies applied to the online practicum and other relevant issues regarding the practicum experience (both in-site and online).
• The second part of the workshop will pair student teachers with school mentors to open dialogue about the best mentoring skills to engage student teachers to learn the profession.

It would be of importance to early detect potential risks in the organization of the event, such as the lack of motivation among the student teachers, lack of a critical mass of participating primary school teachers, or little faculty involvement. In the workshop, good practices and successful teacher training strategies will be documented and shared as key to being adapted by other teachers and schools. Besides, sharing of practices on results and progress of the main topics of the project will be done throughout poster sessions. The most prominent ones should be included in a good practice report on teaching strategies and teacher education.

In short, the ultimate purpose of the proposed two-day meeting will be not only to publicize the project outputs but also to encourage the educational administration and companies to convey the PRAC3 technological tools into the school practice (if proved to be fully effective) and offer them as official resources for the network of teachers of the school district.

April 30th,  2023.

In each country.

20 (policymakers, teaching union representatives, other education stakeholders).

The teaching training course will be addressing teacher educators, schoolteachers, school mentors, faculty advisors, and scholars. Its primary purpose is to qualify educators in a more professionalizing approach to the teaching mentoring practice. More specifically, the objective is threefold: (1) to offer support, resources and guidance to better implement the PRAC3 technologies and strategies in the teaching practice; (2) to facilitate student teachers’ integration process to the schools; (3) explaining the advantages of using the PPT.

The training activities contents will consist of the following sections:

1. Classroom management
2. Technology implementation.
3. Analysis of the teaching practice.
4. Professional Relationships (collaboration).
5. Mentoring skills and profiles
6. Resilience and Emotional well-being.

These sections can be changed according to the project needs.

Mainly student teachers and primary and secondary school teachers. Also, Faculty teachers and others (i.e., stakeholders, representative from teaching unions, etc.).

February 2023. Three days

University of Minho, Portugal.

Mentoring training course Programme

PHOTOS

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