Chapter 18: Preparing Pre- and In-service Teachers to Teach High School Science in a Technology-rich Environment

This chapter sheds light on the issue of preparing teachers to teach with technology and discusses the implications on pre- and in-service teacher professional development programs. Educating science teachers in an era in which information technology is becoming a critical factor, is a complex and demanding task. This chapter describes three related studies. Their goal was to investigate the effect of exposing high school teachers to innovative teaching and learning approaches using information technology, molecular modeling, and computerized laboratories. The studies were conducted at the Department of Education in Technology and Science at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. We describe the objectives, settings, technology, thinking skills, population, assessment method, and findings of these studies, and touch upon various combinations of factors affecting teachers’ readiness to implement technology. The first study investigated pre-service high school teachers, who learned how to use innovative chemistry teaching methods in technology-rich environments for their future classrooms. In the second study we followed the process of integrating a case-based computerized laboratory (CLL) curriculum into about 30 Israeli high schools. In the third study we exposed pre- and in-service science and chemistry teachers to the CCL curriculum and documented their perceptions from both high school students’ and teachers’ viewpoints.