Practicum management and enhancement through an online tool in foreign language teacher education

Abstract

Practicum is an essential and meaningful part of teacher education but due to the great diversity of educational programmes worldwide, their nature and quality depend too much on each particular situation. There is an urgent need to unify and upgrade practicum formats. This paper reports a proposal for technology enhancement and structure reconfiguration of the practicum within the wider curricula. Added to that, we present an Interactive Digital Notepad (IDN) prototype, based on Kanban and powered up by Trello, as an optimal solution to the challenges posed in practicum management in foreign language teacher education programmes. Circumscribed to the Spanish educational context, this IDN is an online tool designed to improve the monitoring of the learning process in order to foster interactive and effective communication among the participants, and to promote critical thinking and autonomy. Results are promising and further steps for further improvement and implementation are outlined.

Keywords

• Practicum
• Teacher education
• Online tool
• Collaborative settings
• Foreign languages