November 7-8, 2013
Host Institution: Humanitarian Institute of Borys Grinchenko Kyiv University
On November 7-8, 2013 the International training seminar "Teachers Educational Initiations" (TEI) for scientific and academic staff of higher education institutions was held together with Microsoft Corporation. Nearly 250 teachers from different Ukrainian Universities took part in this event.
Training consisted of two parts. First, Natalia Morse, Vice-Rector on IT technologies of Borys Grinchenko Kyiv University shared experience of the implementation of new information technologies in the education process. After that, the first interactive training took place where James Garner Ptaszynski, General Director of the World Higher Education, Dr. David Slykhuis, James Madison University, and President of the Society of Informational Technologies in Education (SITE), Melanie Shoffner, Associate Professor of the Chair of English Education in the Purdue University made their presentations. A lot of attention was given to the issues of the pedagogical appropriateness of modern international technologies based on the TRACK platform (http://www.tpack.org/).
The aim of the training was to make the participants got acquainted with new information and communication technologies: education social network for academics www.yammer.com, interactive note board http://padlet.com, electronic notebook MS OneNote etc. Microsoft company developed a special site www.pil-tei.com for the participants of the project TEI where they could use different local resources and electronic library in the field of IT implementation in the educational process at higher schools.
To determine the effectiveness of the use of both pedagogical approach and informational technologies in teaching practice, participants of the training filled in an online questionnaire, results of which were demonstrated in Excel Web Survey on SkyDrive.
Seventeen academics from our University passed the training program and were awarded the status of a Microsoft Faculty Fellow and received certificates.