The requirements imposed on schools and the competencies of teachers change depending on the development of society, and currently their constant growth is considerable. These facts lead to the need to continuously innovate pre-service teacher training, especially with a focus on creating professional digital literacy. The creation of a proposal of an optimal model of pre-service teacher training in the field of teacher trainees’ professional didactic-technological competency development was the subject of the research, which is described in the article. The described research examined the importance of the integration of various kinds of digital didactic tools into pre-service teacher training curricula with regard to the successful performance of the teaching profession. The necessary research data were obtained on the basis of screening the opinions of teacher trainees in Slovakia and the Czech Republic (n = 280). The respondents of the research survey expressed, in terms of various aspects, their opinions on the importance of integrating the issue of working with specified kinds of the given digital means into the curricula of teacher trainees’ study programs. The obtained research data were analysed depending on three segmentation factors of the respondents, which were the nationality of the student (i.e., the COUNTRY of his/her study), the GENDER of the respondent, and the combination of these two factors, i.e., COUNTRY X GENDER. According to the achieved results, there is a need to include or strengthen the teaching of software applications such as ActivInspire, FreeMind, SMART Notebook, Google Docs and, if possible, Prezi and Mindomo, and also a need to emphasize the methodological aspects of the use of these technical means in teaching.

During the last decades, multimedia assisted teaching has expanded to all types and levels of schools. The authors dealt with a question whether there is a possibility through the application of multimedia teaching materials in the natural science school subjects to eliminate students' negative attitudes to these subjects. To answer this question, a research was carried out in which the attention was paid to possibilities to eliminate students` negative attitudes to physics as the most unpopular school subject. The authors show how various aspects of students` opinion on physics can be changed due to the use of animations and interactive simulations of the physical phenomena in the teaching process. For the pedagogical intervention two kinds of multimedia teaching materials were used. The difference between them was in the level of their interactivity. Within the research students` attitudes to physics through the given explored aspects were assessed twice, once before the multimedia teaching material pedagogical intervention and the second time after it. As the research results show, although it is possible to certain rate to eliminate students` negative attitudes to physics, this possible elimination depends also on the level of the intractivity of the used multimedia teaching materials. Key words: change of the attitudes, multimedia assisted teaching, negative attitudes to school subjects, teaching physics.

The paper presents some of the empirical results of the research focused on iden-tification of the ways the primary and secondary school teachers use interactive educational activities and digital means in their teaching practice in dependence on the subjects they teach. The main research question was whether the ways of the use of interactive educational activities and digital means are the same for all teachers, independently on the character of the subject they teach, or whether it depends on the taught subject. As the results have showed, the purposes signifi-cantly differ in dependence on the character of the taught subjects. In the paper, in more detail results for teaching natural science subjects and foreign languages are discussed.

The paper presents particular results of the first phase of a research aimed at improving pre-graduate teacher training in the area of didactic technological competences. The main goal of the prepared research is to modernize and optimize relevant parts of study programs of teacher trainees at Slovak higher education institutions (inclusion and structure the relevant subjects in the study programs, their content and time assignment). The results are related to a questionnaire survey of the current state and perspectives of the continuing professional development of primary and secondary school teachers contributing to their didactic technological competences improvement and development. Main attention is paid to an analysis of the selected questionnaire items in which the respondents assessed significance of the use of various interactive educational activities and digital means in teaching process to inrease efficiency of selected specific aspects of education. The presented analysis is based on the segmentation of the respondents on the factor of the category and sub-category of the teaching staff the respondents belong to.

Education is a constantly evolving field that encompasses various approaches to teaching and learning. In our paper, we focused on qualitative research conducted with future primary level teachers using a STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) approach. The research involved classroom observation, analysis of the student work, and obtaining interpretations from the students via report protocols and focused interviews. We examined the students’ learning and problem-solving strategies within STEAM-based activities as well as their perspectives on its use in primary education. Students participated in the research activity in two stages. In the first stage, further referred to as Activity 1, they followed a predetermined algorithm, instructions to construct an electronic device. The instructions for this device were developed to serve as a resource for primary education and to prepare the students for the second stage. In the second stage, further known as Activity 2, the students were tasked with creating a new electronic device together with providing the instructions. The new device was required to have a practical application. Following the completion of these activities, we collected and analyzed the procedural reflections and didactic interpretations from students. Within these interpretations, we also sought their opinions on how STEAM projects like these could help develop various aspects of STEAM competencies in children such as technical skills and knowledge, algorithmic thinking, and device architecture as well as mathematical and scientific thinking.