USING NEW TECHNOLOGIES IN STUDENT-CENTRED LEARNING STRATEGIES

The current debates regarding the role of education and school in contemporary society have generated the appearance of educational policies which are a priority for the EU. The direction taken by educational and professional formation systems is towards facilitating and ensuring complete access to economic, political and social life for all citizens. In this context, the Education and Formation Process 2010 project aimed at the European integration process of Romania through substantiation of the educational policies of the Ministry of Education, Research, Youth and Sport referring to the access, attractiveness and quality of education and professional formation. The themes promoted were: Improvement of initial and continuous formation of teachers and trainers; development of key competences for a society based on knowledge; attracting a larger number of pupils and students towards the technical-scientific section; improvement of foreign languages learning; ensuring broad access to informational and communication technologies; European mobility and cooperation. Both European and national educational policies and practical ones, promoted and implemented, mentioned above prove the current tendencies that lead to the identification of conditions that an efficient contemporary pedagogy would have to meet, in close liaison with the student-centred learning paradigm. School is called upon to identify the student's individual profile and to encourage personal development. Customizing training based on the characteristics of each student's learning characteristics is a major challenge for teachers. The role of technology in learning is demonstrated by facilitating active-participatory strategies, by differentiating learning styles of students, by motivating and increasing the student activism in the lesson. This study has as strategic directions: analysis of students' learning needs (identification of experiences, skills, attitudes and mistakes typical of each student in order to create bridges between what they already know (their prior knowledge) and what they will learn; encouraging autonomy in learning and collaboration; monitoring progress (students' ability to assume responsibility for their own learning, to demonstrate interpersonal skills, to achieve high quality products, to understand the feedback and to assess the classmates' work); checking understanding (students become better able to manage their work if they are given methods and assessment tools, as they work on undirected tasks); strategies to demonstrate understanding and skills (products and performances highlighted by portfolios, they are a collection of products and performance, created over time which illustrate efforts, progress and acquisitions of students, while lectures held by students are the means by which students share their portfolios, representative parts of their activity, and discuss their interests, learning and goals).