Technically simple and educationally rich multimedia to support authentic tasks in teacher education

摘要

It has been observed that successful education students are those who can project themselves into their future roles as classroom teachers. In response to this, members of the Department of Science and Mathematics Education at the University of Melbourne. Australia have developed a range of technically simple multimedia resources for undergraduate education students that allow the students to participate in authentic tasks with 'virtual children'. These would be difficult or impossible to arrange with real children for large numbers of students. The examples discussed in this paper are from mathematics education, an area which many students find challenging. Observation of students working with these resources shows that they demonstrate deep thinking as they begin to understand how children think about mathematical concepts. They show enhanced reflective practices, especially when they work together in pairs, and so this has become our normal class organisation. As they work with the resources, they learn to pick up clues that will inform them about children's thinking about mathematics in the real classroom, when time will be short. The resources have been developed using simple and inexpensive multimedia tools that can be easily modified or re-purposed for related subjects or other universities.