Interaction Between Teachers And It Products

As the new curriculum innovation of secondary education is prevailing, more and more schools are bringing Information Technology (IT) to their classes. Teachers look forward to the improvement of teaching quality and efficiency, by making full use of digital resources and technologies to support learning of students. But, facing these new IT artifacts, are our teachers ready? Can they effectively use IT in their teaching to enhance learning? What kind of help and support they need in their using all kinds of artifacts. How to promote the IT-oriented professional development of teachers? These are becoming urgent problems. During the outbreak of the illness known as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2003. all lessons of schools in Beijing have been suspended. We provided an artifact, the virtual learning community of Capital Normal University (VLCCNU), to help the middle and high school students to have their classes on the web. At the same time, we acquired plenty of valuable first-hand data, by observing their performance, intercommunicating with them and analyzing all the data auto-recorded by VLCCNU. It provides a pure and real research environment for exploring the interaction between teachers and artifacts.Qualitative and quantitative research methods were adopted in this study. With the quality methods, the author tracked and studied the Web-based instruction process, collected lots of data, and analyzed them. The purpose of using quantitative description (frequency Stat., relation analysis, etc.) is to get a picture of the structure of the system the interaction between teachers and artifacts. At one time, the qualitative research (interview, qualitative analysis, etc.) provides the understanding of the meaning and abundant detail. The integration of two research modes can help to find the relationship between structure and meaning.It was the first time for some teachers to use the artifact. We call them the novices by comparison to the expert teacher. In the processing of their teaching with usingVLCCNU, an expert teacher was tutoring them by VLCCNU. This paper gives adiscussion of the relationship between novice teacher and artifact from the data recorded by VLCCNU. The results of our analysis are as follows.Firstly, the novices were affected by the negative effect of the artifact so that they were less concerned about how to teach and how to learn at the beginning of using VLCCNU. They perhaps need about three-week to adapt to it. Secondly, they gave reaction to the artifact twice on peak during the whole lesson. The first peak reflects that the novices want to draw the environment of the artifact to their old environment because they are not familiar to the artifact. The second peak reflects that the novicesplay their role very well as an organizer and a learning assistant in using the artifact. This reaction is worthy for developing an artifact. Lastly, there are a lot of differences between the novices and the expert teacher in comprehension the functions of the artifact, which cause their different behaviors in teaching actions in using the artifact. As a tutor and manager, they have little difference. But as organizer and learning assistant, there are great differences in their behaviors. So in the project of the IT-oriented professional development of teachers, we should build a community of novice teachers and expert teachers, and pay more attention to how a novice teacher to comprehend an artifact.