Integrating design thinking with artificial intelligence (AI) offers a paradigm shift with wide implications in today's landscape of emergent and rapidly changing digital transformation and innovative STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) educational practices. Curriculum design for STEM education requires initial and continuing professional development of teachers for a scientifically and technologically advanced society. Teachers’ design thinking approach usually refers the approach of a specific problem aimed at developing an optimal solution to a challenge through a solution-based approach and supports learners in fostering creativity and critical thinking as two of the four STEM competencies, along with collaboration and communication, and in preparing an innovative mindset that is necessary to openly embrace the challenge. Design thinking is in a synergetic relation with AI's ability to continuously facilitate learning and adaptation to a changeable educational environment as to promote dynamic and flexible STEM learning activities. A limited area of research has been identified on how STEM content can be incorporated into the curriculum at all educational levels, and a systematic review of the learning techniques and teaching methods that are used to support learning in the STEM fields is needed. This study utilizes a literature review of open access journals and books from the WOS and Google Scholar databases.

An important research task in innovative educational processes is to reveal the possibilities of managing the processes of creating and implementing pedagogical innovations in the practice of educational institutions. Effective use of technology in the classroom is an important criterion. The digital age has introduced the need for a new way of preparing students for a teaching career with new competences, new strategies of teaching - learning - assessment. The use of digital technologies is based on the willingness to make learning more advanced and the necessity to implement a learner-centered approach to make teaching-learning-research interconnected. By projecting and implementing learning activities based on interactive teaching strategies, teachers and students create an environment that plays a key role in improving metacognitive skills, as digital technologies have the potential to support and shape a more active, participatory, personalized and flexible pedagogy. The paper contains a systematic review of scientific literature regarding theoretical models used to help students, as future teachers, to conceptualize effective technology integration.

The rapid evolution of emerging technologies, such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), artificial intelligence (AI), the metaverse, and immersive simulations, has a significant impact on experiential learning. Learners interact with dynamic and interactive environments that go beyond the boundaries of traditional classrooms. While VR bridges the physical and digital realms by creating simulated experiences, AI technologies personalize the learning process and offer new tools for developing the 4Cs competences - creativity, collaboration, critical thinking and communication - adapting and differentiating individual learning paths. Emerging technologies facilitate the design of didactic scenarios including virtual classrooms, adaptive feedback systems, and online interactions as a few of the tools that student teachers can use to implement teaching strategies and reflect on their outcomes. The paper proposes a reconfiguration of the experiential learning cycle which integrates in its stages - concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, and active experimentation - emerging technologies as tools that facilitate practical activities, stimulate collaboration within the triad formed by university coordinator, student teacher and mentor teacher, and consequently deepen the didactic competencies of all the three members. By reviewing existing literature, a conceptual framework for technology-enhanced pedagogical practice within the experiential learning cycle is proposed, in which innovative learning ecosystems can be created. By bridging theory and practice, emerging technologies serve as catalysts for experiential learning, preparing future educators to design and implement innovative didactic strategies developing the technology-enhanced learning environment.

The rate of development of educational technologies has implications not only for the technical capacity of an educational institution to provide hardware and software solutions for the existing learning environment, but also for pedagogical practices that are influenced by stakeholders' acceptance of new technologies. Effective use of emerging technologies requires training future and actual teachers with professional digital literacy skills that provide pathways for connecting best educational practices with modern digital technology-based enhancements to increase the quality of learning environment through the integration of educational technologies, especially in terms of educational agents' perceptions of the effectiveness of technology in delivering educational content and acquiring knowledge. In studies on technology acceptance, the theory of reasoned action (TRA) and the technology acceptance model (TAM) are commonly used to explore the factors that affect users’ intentions to adopt educational technology and less so to study the motivations of pre-service or/and in-service teachers for accepting and integrating emerging technologies into pedagogical practices. This study addresses TRA and TAM to design a framework built on constructs as perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, subjective norms, attitude toward use, behavioral intention, intention to use for explaining or predicting students and teachers' intentions to adopt and use emerging technologies.