Quarantine restrictions and the state of emergency in Ukraine have led to the transition of society, particularly education, to remote interaction in an emergency manner, subsequently affecting the academic performance of students in secondary schools. The low level of readiness among teachers to work in these new conditions has revealed a number of problems in the organisation, communication, and implementation of the educational process. The use of a significant number of digital services and resources of various kinds by each teacher has further complicated the conditions of student learning. This problem is particularly acute in the teaching of natural sciences, which requires a significant amount of visual aids to illustrate the content of the curriculum and demonstrate natural processes and living and non-living objects, while laboratory and practical work require additional specialised equipment, including digital, for conducting research and processing data. Therefore, there is a need to create a structured and effective digital environment for widespread communication among participants in the educational process, ensuring continuity of learning, overcoming students' educational losses, and ensuring the effective implementation of distance learning. The creation of such an environment requires a series of measures, namely: analysis of domestic and foreign experience to determine the best approaches for implementation, selection of a cloud-based platform, and design of the environment by the teacher taking into account the peculiarities of teaching the subject, particularly biology.
In the process of analysing practical experience from foreign countries (USA, Finland, Canada, Austria, Belgium, Great Britain, Germany, France, Czech Republic, Poland, Romania) and theoretical concepts of domestic and foreign scientists on organizing distance learning, the use of cloud technologies for organizing distance learning in educational institutions revealed a number of objective contradictions between: the modern development of ICT and the lag in scientific and methodological research regarding their systematic use in organizing distance learning; significant technological potential of modern cloud technologies and the insufficient level of their implementation in the educational process of secondary schools; systematic increase in the level of teachers' competence in the field of using information and communication technologies and the low level of ability to adapt traditional pedagogical methods to the virtual environment; increasing societal demands for organizing distance learning in secondary schools and the low level of use of cloud-based environments; features of organizing distance learning in natural sciences and insufficient development of scientific and methodological support for designing cloud-based educational environments for distance learning in biology by teachers.
Therefore, the problem of scientific-theoretical substantiation and design of a cloud-oriented environment for distance learning in biology remains unresolved, requiring scientific-methodical justification and development of corresponding methodology, and the study "Methodology for designing a cloud-oriented environment for distance learning in biology in informal education conditions" is relevant and demanded by the pedagogical community.
To address this problem and select a platform for designing a cloud-oriented environment for distance learning in biology, the author has developed criteria (features of the target audience, integration, organisation of online communications, organisation of educational materials, assignment of tasks, storage and exchange of information, use of mobile applications, organisation of methodological support) and conducted expert evaluation of digital platforms Google Class and Microsoft Teams, which are free and accessible to teachers.
During the research, a series of models describing the competence of teachers formed in the process of designing a cloud-oriented environment for distance learning in biology were developed for the first time, namely: a model for forming teachers' competencies in designing a cloud-oriented environment for distance learning in biology and a procedural model for designing a cloud-oriented environment for distance learning in biology by teachers in informal education conditions. The pedagogical precondition for implementing these models is the formation of teachers' competence in the field of information and communication technologies, which includes not only mastering the skills of using tools and technologies but also proper implementation of these tools in professional practice.
