Effectiveness of Web-Based Technology in Preservice and Inservice Teacher Education Programs

All CIC institutions are involved in various ways with the preparation of future teachers or with professional development for practicing teachers, and in each of these institutions we see efforts to refine or redesign programs as part of the overall systemic reform of education agenda (Loucks-Horsley, 1997). More specifically, there are efforts to prepare teachers to address the needs of their students in a highly diverse, globalized, knowledge-rich, and technology-enhanced world. While teachers still need to help students learn the "hard skills" of basic literacy and computation, there are increasing demands for the "soft skills," such as the abilities to communicate with those from different perspectives and parts of the world, to articulate problems out of complex and messy situations, and to collaborate with others (Murnane & Levy, 1996). Awareness of the need for this broader base of skills has been one impetus for the reform of coursework and accompanying practical experiences in teacher education programs. A central theme in these reform efforts is that learning is the process of constructing meaning. This view of learning moves beyond memorization, recording, and storing information to the analysis of phenomena, in short, to more inquiry-based instruction (Beyer, 1971).unpublishednot peer reviewe