Construct in-service Training Web Site for School Teachers Jia-Rong Jerome Wen* and Wen-Chin Chen** *[email protected] **[email protected]

1. Introduction Information technology grows rapidly recently. People use Internet to obtain many kinds of information. The Internet has become the most important path in cyber world. In the last five years, using the Internet to carry out distance learning, especially for teachers’ in-service training, changes the style of education. To actualize the policy which was to build an lifelong-learning education environment, Ministry of Education delegated National Kaohsiung Normal University (NKNU) to manage Asynchronous Distance Learning class for high school teachers in Oct, 1999.

2. Construct Asynchronous Distance Learning Web page Generally speaking, teachers have to control the instructive materials, activities, learning process and evaluation. Every instruction system must include all of the three factors as following: 2.1 Instructive materials and activity designing If we just put the materials onto web site, they look like electronic books on Internet. It is helpless for students. Therefore, when designing the contents of curriculum, we make it in “practicing“ orientation. Activities make teacher and students interact with each other and avoid students to feel humdrum or like reading an electronic book. 2.2 Evaluation When students finish learning a chapter, we give them an formative evaluation to verify whether students master the thesis or not. If students pass the formative evaluation, they can continue the curriculum. If not, they have to go back and learn it again until they pass the formative evaluation. The system would give some feedback to students, they would know which part of contents they don’t understand yet. Then, we always hold an examination when finishing the curriculum, the summative evaluation. (Figure-1) Contents` learning

Formative Evaluation

Whether Student masters the contents or not? No

Relearn contents

Yes Complete Learning

Figure-1 Formative Evaluation of Contents` Learning (Kuo Sheng-Iu,1993,p294) 2.3 Learning process Instead of quantification of examination, we should care about the reflection from students after instruction and learning. Grades cannot decide students` learning efficiency. During designing the materials, we considered every details of students` learning process. These include u counts in connection u counts in joining the forum u contents what student discuss u chatting situation between teacher and students u Homework – students work hard or not u Chapter evaluation (formative evaluation)

u teachers and students communicate by email All items can be saved into database so that we can estimate student’s behavior in learning.

3. Concepts on designing curriculum We design several activities and strategies. The activities will make students concentrate on the contents. we consider about the strategies as following: 3.1 Homework ： We assign homework after students finish learning every chapter. They can evaluate themselves through homework to know how much they learn and review contents again. 3.2 Operati ve Orientation ： In the homework, they have to work some operation by computer, such as computer game. 3.3 Self-determination : Self-determination means that students have to study by themselves and plan study schedule by themselves. 3.4 Interactive : We define interaction into two ways : one direction and two direction (Table-1). One direction Two direction One direction: teacher to student Asynchronous Announcement FAQ On-Line Forum Two direction: teacher and student Synchronous Chat Room Table-1 Interactive model 3.5 User Interface ： What users feel about it is very important in internet environment. Hyperlink always be mazes for a novice in the internet. Trying to solve user interface problem , we use several ways as following : 3.5.1 Frame：cut web pages into several frame to reduce confusing 3.5.2 Tree menu：from the reaction of students , the tree menu is easy to access the pages 3.5.3 Learning Path：guideline for students on the web

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