Developing Teachers’ Inclusive Competence by Means of ICT in Postgraduate Education

Abstract

The traditional organization of increasing the teachers’ level of inclusive competence in the system of postgraduate education in the framework of stationary courses is not effective enough. One of the reasons for this is lack of access to a large amount of the latest information that is available in modern research. Rapid changes in information technologies development open up more opportunities for modern teacher to acquire the necessary professional knowledge for teaching children with special educational needs. The article proposes an improved organization for increasing the level of inclusive competence in the postgraduate education, in which, along with traditional training in the framework of stationary courses, teachers, using ICT, participate in online courses and webinars posted on various educational platforms in the Internet. The characteristics of educational platforms ed-era.com, futurelearn.com, elt.oup.com, coursera.org, vseosvita.ua were analyzed. Pedagogical experiment was carried out, in which 2 groups of English teachers participated. In the control group, professional development was carried out traditionally, and in the experimental group – within the framework of improved organization of training. The analysis of the results showed that in the experimental group the greater level of inclusive competence was achieved in comparison with the control group. It was proved that this result was achieved thanks to improved organization of training using ICT tools. The results of the pedagogical experiment indicate the advantage of proposed organization for teachers’ inclusive competence development in comparison with the existing one. In connection with the above, the work, in our opinion, is of international importance.