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Virtual teacher practicum All teacher education programs require teacher candidates to have in-school practicum experiences. Placing student teachers in schools is not easy, however, and it is getting harder. Institutions must find local schools willing to participate in the student teacher program. According to the field experience office at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, it is getting more difficult to find schools where the teacher candidates can practice because of the limited number of local schools and the increasing competition for spaces from competing institutions [1] Another problem is connected with limited hours of in-school practicum and the negative experience that teachers can receive. It must also be considered that students can receive negative experiences as well. In order to avoid this J. Yoon suggests cyber practicum in the form of a three-dimensional, online world adapted for student teaching. In this virtual classroom candidate tacher will be able to select classroom environment, classroom equipment and type of students. In this virtual teacher practicum students are not real persons, but computer programes with avatar for each student. Avatars are programed to react positively or negatively to candidate teacher's strategies for information presenting and learning tasks design and implementation. Thus candidate teachers will be able to experiment with different teaching strategies, presentations infront of student audience, assessment of students' progress and selfassessment of personal progress as candidate teacher. But they will learn how to teach and how to communicate with students in safe environmentq without receiving negative experiences and without "destroying" students in the process of their teaching. [2] Sounds great, but is it possible? Simaula project is building such three dimensional aula for candidate teachers virtual practicum. Uniting 4 universities, software company and school from five countries the project is trying to develop a new environment for virtual teaching practicum. [3]
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