These results showed that both LFs and coaches did improve their skills and practice after training at least 6 months later, including the skill in computer technology S, the ability to
Trang 1all significantly higher than those on their posttests, t=3.48, p=.00, t=2.80, p=.01, and t=2.50, p=.02, respectively; for coaches, t=5.31, p=.00, t=5.47, p=.00, and t=5.10, p=.00, respectively These results showed that both LFs
and coaches did improve their skills and practice after training (at least 6 months later), including the skill in computer technology (S), the ability to integrate technology into teaching (A), and the frequency of integrating technology into teaching (F)
Note: The skill in computer technology (S); the ability to integrate technology into teaching
(A); The frequency of integrating technology into teaching (F)
Fig 4 Results of LFs’ S & P Survey Fig 5 Results of coaches’ S & P Survey 7.2.4 Local Facilitators’ Attitude Survey
A total of 45 and 44 LFs participated in the 2nd and 3rd year attitude survey, respec-tively The results show that teachers are pleased to participate in the promotion of coaches’ training if bonuses, certificates, and some practical assistance are provided (1) 83% of teachers obtained information from educational websites and official school documents
(2) 81% of teachers took serious interest in the topic and hoped the activity would
be useful for their teaching
(3) LFs are more willing to conduct Peer Coaching activities if a certificate or prize and sufficient sponsorship are provided
(4) Most LFs required assistance in printing handouts and sending out memos to teachers
(5) In terms of teacher acceptance and willingness to popularize Peer Coaching activities: out of a total score of 5, means of 4.29 and 4.14 were observed for the 2nd and 3rd year
From the points given above, we observe that LFs who joined the Peer Coaching activities agreed with the ideas of the Peer Coaching project and were glad to announce related information to their co-workers However, they had a low intention to hold Peer Coaching activities because of the lack of administrative and resource support From the third and fourth points, we realized that more LFs would be willing to hold the
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activity if basic resources and assistance were provided We, thus, arranged to provide some support, certificates and handouts which could be freely downloaded from our website Moreover, we offered the location, announcements and lecturers to assist in holding Peer Coaching activities if required
7.3 Empirical Studies
We conducted two empirical researches (pretest and posttest quasi-experimental de-signs) in the first and the second year, respectively The main purpose of this 1st study was to investigate the effectiveness of WebQuest in promoting higher order thinking and learning motivation for elementary school students The participants included 104 sixth grade students in three classes at an elementary school in Tainan The independent variable was instructional strategy with three levels: traditional instruction, WebQuest with no resources provided, and WebQuest with resources provided The dependent variables were the students’ HOT scores (critical thinking skills and problem solving skills) and learning motivation The results of this study are summarized as follows: (a)
no significant differences were found among the three groups in terms of students’ critical thinking skills; (b) students’ problem-solving skills improved after the imple-mentation of WebQuest with resources provided; (c) no significant differences were found among the three groups in terms of learning motivation; (d) the factors influencing WebQuest instruction included HOT levels, process explicitness, learning style, and description of links of resources; (e) the advantages of engaging students in WebQuest instruction included an increase in students’ ICT skills, competence in searching web-sites, and inquiry-based learning skills
The purpose of the 2nd study was to explore the effectiveness of WebQuest on the higher-order thinking, learning motivation, and English achievement of elementary school students The participants were 105 sixth-grade students in three classes en-rolled at a large elementary school in Tainan The independent variable was instruc-tional strategy with three levels: tradiinstruc-tional instruction (the comparison group), WebQuest with resources (treatment I), and WebQuest with resources and then without resources (treatment II) The dependent variables were problem-solving skills, learning motivation, and English achievement The results indicated: 1) There were no statis-tically significant differences among these three classes in learning motivation 2) For problem solving skills, students who participated in treatments I and II performed significantly better than those who participated in the comparison group 3) For English achievement, students who participated in treatment II performed significantly better than those who participated in the comparison group and treatment I
7.4 Interview
According to the frequency and length of time they surfed PBL.NET, four teachers were chosen to take part in the interviews These four teachers included two LFs, one coach, and one influenced teacher In addition, we also randomly selected six boys and six girls for interviews who had teachers that had implemented WebQuest for school teaching and student learning
Trang 3Teachers gained knowledge sharing and ease of teaching from PBL.NET Teachers were inspired to organize their teaching materials and display them systematically Also, they were encouraged to design attractive teaching activities WebQuest enriches students’ vocabulary and develops their innovation and creativity, and teachers ex-perienced greater achievement In addition, teachers’ suggestions about PBL.NET are
to design an interface with personalized features, to set up real-time interactive func-tions for PBL.NET, and to increase the number of files that can be uploaded There were five reasons given by students about the benefits of WebQuest: increased ICT skills, improved data coordination, enhanced webpage searching ability, improved inquiry skills in the network, and increased student interest in “learning.”
7.5 Summary for Evaluation Results
Our evaluation of this project included four surveys, an empirical analysis of the re-search results, and interviews Based on the results from the Post-Unit Survey, our LFs have a greater understanding of the training content From the results of the Feedback Survey for Peer Coaching Training, we realized that more practice time should be included in the training workshop, and standard operation handbooks and handouts should be provided for the LFs in training their coaches These requests have been processed by modifying our training schedule and providing training handbook, handouts, and PowerPoint slides for LFs to download on our PBL.NET website Ac-cording to the Skills and Practice survey, teachers possessing high ICT skills do not necessarily make effective use of them during their instruction We, thus, need to fur-ther encourage teachers to integrate their ICT skills into their teaching in the third year
In addition, the results of the Local Facilitators’ Attitude Survey showed that teachers are pleased to participate in the promotion of coaches’ training if bonuses, certificates and some practical assistance are provided Furthermore, the results of the empirical research indicated that students’ problem solving skills and academic achievement were significantly enhanced after WebQuest instruction Although critical thinking and learning motivation were not improved during the one-semester experiment, we will continue to track and observe this progress during the next academic year Finally, the results of the interviews demonstrated that both teachers and students have learned new teaching and learning skills from this Peer Coaching project Students also increased their ICT skills, and website-searching competence, as well as gained satisfaction in learning accomplishments
8 Conclusions
Due to the development of the Internet and the ICT skills, teachers have more oppor-tunities to learn from each other to promote students’ better learning results Under the guidance of coaches, many teachers are adopting new strategies that appear to be re-sulting in improved student learning (Bogner, 2002; Guiney, 2001; Wong & Nicotera, 2003) Hence, the Peer Coaching Program is one of the best ways for teachers to do cooperative learning In the planning of the program, there are many factors that need to
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be considered In order to make the program work more efficiently and successfully, reflection and modification are very important processes In addition, government support and policies will affect the success of the promotion of the program Therefore,
it is important to help the government understand the purpose of peer coaching so that
we can have more government support
As to the planning of the program, we suggest that it should be designed as a three-year program In this way, not only will the training scale be enlarged, but more importantly with such non-stop promotion, we can keep modifying the training process
to make the training program more effective Also, to promote the program, the most important elements are budget, resources, and specialists Only with the cooperation of industry, government, and academia can the national teaching environment and quality
be improved Consequently, the training program will be implemented more efficiently and successfully so that peer coaching can play an effective role in helping teachers integrate technology into their classrooms in ways that encourage active learning by their students It is our hope that as more teachers are involved in this program, the program can reach more teachers to develop standards-based instruction through gaged learning and technology integration In conclusion, with our continuous en-deavor in the third year, this project, we believe, will inspire more creative ICT-integrated teaching and learning to provide a better quality of K-12 instruction
References
Austin, D.S.: New literacies: Are Colorado Teacher Education Programs Preparing Pre-service Teachers to Use Technology in Their Learning Environments? Unpublished Dissertation, University of Denver (2004)
Bogner, J.: Teacher Leadership and Peer Coaching (2002),
http://www.partnersinschools.org/resources/TeacherLeadership_ and_PeerCoaching.pdf
Dodge, B.: WebQuests: A Technique for Internet-Based Learning Distance Educator 1, 10–13 (1995)
Guiney, E.: Coaching isn’t just for Athletes: The Role of Teacher Leaders Phi Delta Kappan 82, 740–743 (2001)
Loucks-Horsley, S., Hewson, P.W., Love, N., Stiles, K.E.: Designing Professional Development for Teachers of Science and Mathematics Thousand Oaks, CA (1998)
Miller, N.N.: The Technology Float in Education Today Science Activities 35, 3–4 (1998) Saye, J.W.: Technology in the Classroom: The Role of Dispositions in Teacher Gatekeeping Journal of Curriculum and Supervision 13, 210–234 (1998)
Schwab, R.L.: Technology and the Changing Roles and Responsibilities of Teacher Educators In: Switzer, T (ed.) In Log In or Log Out: Technology in 21st Century Teacher Education, Washington, D.C (2000)
Tonkin, S., Baker, J.D.: Peer Coaching for Online Instruction: An Emerging Model for Faculty Development In: 19th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning (2006) Wong, K., Nicotera, A.: Enhancing Teacher Quality: Peer Coaching as a Professional Devel-opment Strategy a Preliminary Synthesis of the Literature (2003),
http://www.temple.edu/lss/pdf/publications/pubs2003-5.pdf
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© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008
UNITE - a European-Wide Network of Schools
Christoph Hornung1, Andrina Granić2, Maja Ćukušić2, and Kawa Nazemi1
1 Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics, Darmstadt, Germany
{christoph.hornung,kawa.nazemi}@igd.fraunhofer.de
2 Faculty of Science, University of Split, Split, Croatia {andrina.granic,maja.cukusic}@pmfst.hr
Abstract The upcoming Web 2.0 technologies change the aspects of eLearning
fundamentally The traditional paradigm of classroom teaching and homework learning will develop further towards sharing experiences and knowledge in word-wide social communities Moreover, knowledge capturing in ambient en-vironments gains more and more importance These aspects characterize the so-called eLearning 2.0 This paper describes a prototype of an eLearning 2.0 system covering the different aspects such as platform, pedagogy and scenarios The concepts presented here have been applied in the EU-project UNITE The implementation of this system in the setting of a European network of fourteen schools is presented as an iterative four stage process, covering scenario plan-ning and implementation, validation in addition to platform and process improvement Achieved intermediate results from the first iteration of the im-plementation process are discussed and future work is presented
Keywords: Web 2.0, eLearning 2.0, eKnowledge repositories, knowledge
pro-cessing, eLearning standards, e/mLearning
1 Introduction
Nowadays eLearning solutions are mostly based on the Web 1.0 paradigm Web 1.0 can be characterized as single user and data-download centred With the upcoming features of Web 2.0, this situation changes completely Support of communities and folksonomies, as well as communicating and collaborating user groups become preva-lent Moreover, these user groups also upload data to the web and, herewith, the Web becomes a medium for group-based interaction Consequently, application fields like eLearning will change and develop further Different aspects of this paradigm shift are presented and the EU-project UNITE [1] as an application case offered
The paper is structured as follows Section 2 introduces state-of-the-art along with challenges of eLearning 2.0 and the UNITE project Section 3 concentrates on the technical aspects of the design and implementation of eLearning 2.0 platforms whereas section 4 focuses on enhanced eKnowledge repositories Section 5 describes the implementation of the e/mLearning platform in Spinut School Finally, Section 6 concludes the paper and brings future plans