Readiness of Teachers of Geografhy of Special Schools in Slovak Republic to Use the Electronic Manual With  it Support

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to highlight the level of readiness of teachers of geography of special schools of the Slovak Republic (on the example of 14 of special and inclusive education institutions of the Košice Region) to the use of an electronic didactic manual on IT support. Teachers of the Department of Special Pedagogy of the Pedagogical Faculty of the Catholic University in Ruzomberok together with teachers of the geography of special schools prepared an electronic didactic manual on IT support taking into account modern requirements to the level of knowledge, abilities and psychophysical capabilities of school children with special education needs. The manual has helped to raise the level of geographical learning among school children of special school. The convincing results of the pedagogical experiment are described in the previous article «Using a didactic tool with IT-support for teaching geography in a special school in Slovakia». However, in the course of studying the question the researchers concluded that success in the work depends on the level of readiness of the teacher for this work. Namely, the presence of interest and motivation to the introduction of innovative forms of training for the subjects of the education process the attitude of the teacher to the organization of the education process, the level of professional training (possession of the means and technologies of training). To obtain objective and unbiased results Google Form has conducted a survey of teachers of geography. The first set of questions – the reference one – provided an opportblocky to explain the answers of the second set of questions – the informative one. The statistical processing of the survey results supports the assumption that the quality of the IT-supported e-manual is largely dependent on the teacher’s readiness. The results also show that the majority of teachers of geography surveyed are well aware of the benefits of this teaching tool and are now ready to put the manual into practice. However, due to the rapid progress in the use of information and communication technologies the teachers of special schools do not deny the need to improve their professional knowledge of the use of ICT in postgraduate teacher training.