Anna Linda Szirmai

Analyses on the proliferation of Information and Communication Technologies in education unanimously position teachers as key factors for the success of ICT in schools. In spite of in-service courses, rigorously controlled for quality by government accreditation agencies, the percentage of teachers using ICT regularly in class as reported by international surveys has not increased considerably since the eighties. Pre-service courses include technological and pedagogical knowledge and practice but rarely focus on personality development. Our assumption is that the failure of in-service ICT teacher training courses to produce conceptual change among teachers towards the use of ICT is due to neglected personality factors. The UNESCO Centre for ICT in Education EPICT, the European Pedagogical ICT Licence (www.epict.org) is based on collaboration of teacher teams mentored in a highly interactive e-learning environment by experienced peers. Learners must teach using ICT already during the...

Analyses on the proliferation of Information and Communication Technologies in education unanimously position teachers as key factors for the success of ICT in schools. In spite of in-service courses, rigorously controlled for quality by government accreditation agencies, the percentage of teachers using ICT regularly in class as reported by international surveys has not increased considerably since the eighties. Pre-service courses include technological and pedagogical knowledge and practice but rarely focus on personality development. Our assumption is that the failure of in-service ICT teacher training courses to produce conceptual change among teachers towards the use of ICT is due to neglected personality factors. The UNESCO Centre for ICT in Education EPICT, the European Pedagogical ICT Licence (www.epict.org) is based on collaboration of teacher teams mentored in a highly interactive e-learning environment by experienced peers. Learners must teach using ICT already during the...

Analyses on the proliferation of Information and Communication Technologies in education unanimously position teachers as key factors for the success of ICT in schools. In spite of in-service courses, rigorously controlled for quality by government accreditation agencies, the percentage of teachers using ICT regularly in class as reported by international surveys has not increased considerably since the eighties. Pre-service courses include technological and pedagogical knowledge and practice but rarely focus on personality development. Our assumption is that the failure of in-service ICT teacher training courses to produce conceptual change among teachers towards the use of ICT is due to neglected personality factors. The UNESCO Centre for ICT in Education EPICT, the European Pedagogical ICT Licence (www.epict.org) is based on collaboration of teacher teams mentored in a highly interactive e-learning environment by experienced peers. Learners must teach using ICT already during the...

Surveys on the spread of computer culture in education unanimously position teachers as key factors in the success of ICT in schools. Massive national in- service training programmes, however, do not yield results comparable to the investment. Such programmes in Hungary are rigorously controlled for quality by the government accreditation agency, - still, the percentage of teachers using ICT regularly in class as reported by national assessment projects does not seem to rise considerably since the eighties. When piloting a new distance education course on "digital pedagogy", - an effort to build another bridge above troubled educational waters between current pedagogical models and digital teaching-learning solutions - our team decided to consider personality traits of teachers and compare how individual characteristics are reflected in learning strategies, quality of course tasks, and response to different types of mentoring. We correlated the California Personality Inven...

This prospective, non-randomised follow-up study was designed to compare the health-related quality of life (HRQoL), perceived social support (PSS) and overall life satisfaction (OLS) in female patients receiving standard medical care for malignant diseases with or without additional belly dancing. The patients were recruited in the Outpatient Department of the National Institute of Oncology, Budapest, Hungary during the period of 2008-2009. 55 patients joined the one-year-long rehabilitation program (research group, RG) while 59 age-matched patients who received only standard medical care volunteered for clinical assessment (control group, CG). HRQoL, PSS and OLS were assessed using validated questionnaires: EORTC QLQ-C30, F-SozU-K14, and Campbell's OLS, respectively. The scores obtained in RG and CG were controlled for baseline socio-demographic characteristics and evaluated by ANCOVA analysis. It was found that patients of the RG scored better at both the baseline and follow-up than the CG, and the differences between the two groups' measured parameters increased further during the course of the study. The respective baseline values in RG and CG were 56.6 ± 10.3 vs 63.5 ± 12 for HRQoL, 65.2 ± 5.5 vs 57.4 ± 8.8 for PSS and 57.4 ± 8.1 vs 48.4 ± 10.7 for OLS. The corresponding follow-up scores were 51.9 ± 4.4 vs 59.9 ± 11.2 (F = 10.637, p = 0.001) for HRQoL, 67.5 ± 2.7 vs 53.9 ± 10.5 (F = 2.646, p = 0.000) for PSS and 59.5 ± 9.6 vs 45.0 ± 11.5 (F = 2.402, p = 0.001) for OLS. Belly dance intervention can be applied as a complementary rehabilitation method to improve HRQoL, PSS and OLS in female patients treated for malignant diseases.