Preparing teachers for the classrooms of tomorrow poses new challenges given rapidly changing technologies that have had wide impact on society. As electronic resources for learning become increasingly important to learning across the country (NCES, 1999) and around the world, technology instruction needs to become a major integrated component of preservice teacher education programs (OTA, 1995). Curriculum restructuring based on the integration of appropriate technologies is an important step toward systemic reform.

In 1996, the International Society for Technology in Education’s Standards Committee tackled this challenge by recommending a set of Technology Standards for All Teachers that has been adopted by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE, 1997). Since then, several state departments of education, including Illinois, have been developing their own Technology Standards for those seeking teacher certification. This paper describes a framework used by the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign to integrate technology instruction based on these technology standards into a redesigned teacher education certification program.

In support of these program reforms, we have developed and formatively evaluated a set of instructional resources known as Teacher Education Databases, or TEbases. This paper describes the previous, current and planned uses of TEbases as aids to the reform of teacher preparation.

National standards have loomed large on the educational landscape in recent years. Standards-based reform efforts have both adherents and detractors, but from either side of the fence it is clear that any checklist or set of standards adopted from outside must have its terms operationally defined in use in each specific educational setting. If educational programs are to do more than pay lip service to a set of standards, they must incorporate them as part of a continuing dialog about their educational goals, methods and practices.

Revisions to the University of Illinois’ preservice teacher education programs during the 1998-99 academic year have stressed the importance of technological skills for new teachers at all grade levels and subject areas. To this end, we have adopted the 18 ISTE/NCATE Foundation Standards as competencies that our students ought to attain before graduating. The College decided to integrate technology across junior- and senior-year methods courses, rather than to create a separate technology-specific course. The major rationale is to ensure that the technology use would be treated as essential components of good teaching, rather than as something separate.

The Redesigned Certification Program and the Technology Strand

For the past three years, the teacher education program at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign has been instituting a redesign to promote constructivist learning and weave a thread of technology throughout the curriculum. The redesigned teacher certification program's major purpose was to change program content and delivery to better prepare elementary teachers to meet the challenges of education in the 21^st century. Some of the major components included an emphasis on the topics of diversity and technology. Teachers in the 21^st century need to be prepared to teach students from other cultural and linguistic backgrounds, as well as students with special needs. Teachers must also be able to use technology effectively in the classroom and to prepare their students for living and working in an increasingly technological society. Field experiences were included with methods courses being taught concurrently. Students are placed in a cohort that encourages collaboration and teamwork, and encourages reflections on field experiences and course work. The program follows a spiral curriculum in which themes are introduced early in the professional sequence and are elaborated and developed throughout the program.

As part of this redesign, we created a distributed course, Content Area Applications of Educational Technology. In the redesigned program, pre-service teacher education students are required to take this distributed course on the use of technology in education, which is stranded through all the pre-service courses, early field and student teaching experiences that they have over a two year period. Five major topics are included in the technology strand: Computers in the K-12 classroom, Computer networks, Instructional & classroom management strategies, Social issues, and Keeping current with technology. What began as a pilot program for a small group of senior-year students was expanded during the 1998-99 academic year to cover all juniors and seniors pursuing certification as elementary or secondary school teachers.

The assignments for the technology strand are based on the ISTE/NCATE Technology Standards for All Teachers and the Technology Standards currently being adopted by the Illinois State Board of Education. In this framework, students have been actively engaged in learning how to use technology in their content area or grade level and how to develop and implement lesson plans that will include the use of technology in their teaching. The technology strand has been coordinated by a faculty member experienced in the use of technologies, working closely with the instructors of the teacher preparation courses.

Implementation of the new curriculum

A number of meetings between the teaching methods course instructors and the technology instructor were held to discuss what technology topics would be most useful for faculty and students to use in their teaching and learning. The instructors then made decisions about when these topics would be introduced and coordinated with other methods courses over the two years that students are in our teacher preparation program.

We began implementing the technology strand in the fall semester of 1998 with students in the four content areas of our Secondary Certification Program. These students were given hands-on instruction in a computer lab throughout the semester within the context of a required course in the redesigned program, Teaching in a Diverse Society. This gave the teacher education faculty an opportunity to refine their syllabus in ways that integrated appropriate technology activities.

During this first year, students learned how to use email for one-to-one communication and web-based asynchronous conferencing systems for group discussions. Students were assigned readings related to the use of technology in K-12 classrooms, searched the World Wide Web for content related resources, and learned how to evaluate the content of web pages and CD-ROM software for use in their content areas. Students also learned how to create personal web pages and upload files to a student server. Based on the course content, some students also began using digital cameras, presentation software, graphing calculators and spreadsheet programs.

The decision to strand technology across courses required that we develop a set of tools which could facilitate interactions between students and teachers and which would allow us to track those interactions across courses and semesters. We first began development of the Technology Competencies Database (TCD) over two years ago. Our inspiration was B. Levin’s (1996) suggestion to use a portfolio approach to document students’ mastery of the Foundation Standards. In the year following initial development of the TCD, colleagues of the developers became interested and piloted the TCD at their institutions (Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville and National Louis University) in varying degrees to address the same preservice needs (Brehm, Moran, Bievenue, Andris, Handler, Levin, & Payne, 1997). .

In its basic form, the TCD gives learners the opportunity to describe how they have met the ISTE/NCATE Foundation Competencies and allows their instructors to assess whether the learners have in fact reached the competencies. It does this by combining a server-administered database management system with an interface accessible via the World Wide Web. The combination provides a central repository for information, with the ability for students and teachers to connect to the system from any computer equipped with a standard web browser like Netscape Communicator or Microsoft Internet Explorer (Levin, Buell, & Waugh, 1998).

Using the TCD, students first select a competency they believe they have met, then enter a written description of how they have attained the competency; often, their description includes a link to a student’s own web page which provides more detailed information. The faculty member then has the option of accepting the student’s submission or requesting additional evidence from the student. With the student’s permission, outstanding examples become available for other TCD users to see and learn from, so the tool continues to grow in utility as students add to it. Working with the TCD throughout their preservice program, students develop the competencies through different course experiences. Their own matrix of achieved competencies becomes a fluid document, easy to revise as their skills develop further.

Beginning in the spring semester of 1997, we conducted formative evaluations of the TCD as it was being used on a voluntary, pilot basis with one instructor and about 40 senior-year students. These evaluations continued into the 1997-1998 academic year with the same instructor and other students, and included participant observations, dissemination and analysis of questionnaires, and interviews and discussions with the instructor and several students (Levin, Buell, & Waugh, 1998). We learned that students were satisfied overall with the TCD’s ease of use and pleased with its ability to display their submissions as an electronic portfolio that would demonstrate their growing abilities. However, we also found that the students had difficulty understanding what the competencies meant, and that the faculty member experienced great difficulty keeping up with the rate of the students’ submissions. (In fact, the instructor never got around to assessing over half of the students’ submissions.) Our findings led us to make certain improvements to the design immediately, notably adding plain-language paraphrases to the ISTE/NCATE competencies descriptions. The results of our research also led us to re-think how we might adapt the TCD design to make it a tool that teachers would find as worthwhile and easy to use as students did.

A primary goal in designing the Technology Competencies Database was to facilitate open-ended learning experiences in which students compare what they need to know to what they have learned and are learning, and then provide evidence of their learning to their teachers. The TCD was at least somewhat successful in this — it engaged the interest of 42 of the 57 students to whom it was made available, and these students, working voluntarily and independently, submitted responses for an average of over four competencies apiece (Levin, Buell, & Waugh, 1998). However, it had become evident to us that staging an open-ended learning task in ways that make sense to students was only part of the challenge of successful technology integration. In addition, the faculty had to be brought on board in ways that engaged their teaching styles and fit with their ideas of education.

Our goal has been to work with specific courses to identify class assignments and corresponding competencies. When students successfully complete their assignments, we wanted them to be aware of which technology competencies have been accomplished. As the students proceed through the two-year certification program, we wanted them to be able to view their progress toward proficiency in all the technology competencies. In this way, the evaluation of the submissions can be more naturally distributed across multiple faculty, and the work of submitting and evaluating assignments have become part of the normal course load for students and faculty. As described in the remainder of this paper, TEbase, a web-enabled database derived from the TCD, has answered these challenges.

The revised TCD was renamed TEbase (Teacher Education database) and has become an organization and management tool for students and faculty in the preservice teacher education program at UIUC. A separate TEbase was created for each of two elementary methods courses and four secondary level content areas (Mathematics, Science, English, and Social Studies) during the fall semester of 1998. The main features of TEbase v1.0 include:

• individual logins for each student and each instructor
• a text field for instructors to enter assignments
• a text scrolling field for students to submit their assignment or a text field to enter a URL for an assignment on the web
• radio buttons for instructors to assign a grade
• a text field for instructor feedback
• a "Grades at a Glance" view for instructors to see an overview of all students’ grades for the entire course

A demonstration version of TEbase v1.0 is available at http://lrsdb2.ed.uiuc.edu:591/activdb/default.html . Requirements for hosting TEbase v1.0 are the same as those for the sample TCD.

Our students will be using TEbase to submit individual assignments for each course taken over a two-year period. Using the Web, students can type assignments directly into the database or enter a URL that points to the location of their assignment. The URL is usually linked to their personal homepage or web-based discussion archive that can be accessed at a later date in the development of a professional portfolio. While a hard copy professional portfolio is a requirement for graduation, most of the students have been also creating electronic portfolios. These portfolios will be used by students looking for teaching positions after graduation and later in their professional careers.

While students use TEbase as an organizational tool, faculty use TEbase to provide students with feedback on their assignments, grade and record assignments, track students’ progress through the course, publish exemplary student work, and map technology standards to the different assignments. While teachers do have the option of requesting paper copies of the assignments, several instructors have expressed appreciation for the ease of using the Web to access students’ assignments either from the university or their home.

Each secondary content area course is taught by a different instructor, each with his/her own teaching style and focus, so technology activities identified by the technology instructor have been adapted accordingly and integrated at different times during each semester.

Since students use technology in each of their courses throughout a two-year period, TEbase was redesigned after the first semester of implementation to monitor technology assignments and competencies by student rather than by course. This redesign was needed to help the technology instructor monitor the integration of technology into the content area courses across the entire certification program.

In Fall, 1998, there were six junior-year education classes (222 students) using TEbases: two elementary education methods classes and four separate methods classes for students preparing for secondary-level certification in math, science, English and social studies. Due to the scheduling of the elementary education students, complete TEbase evaluation data are not yet available. Therefore the results reported here include only the 148 secondary education students. Each TEbase was built around a different set of activities, and all of these activities were related back to the ISTE/NCATE technology competencies. Through periodic administration of questionnaires and analysis of database records, we tracked the development of students’ understandings and use of TEbase over the course of the year. In the Fall semester there were few difficulties with the technical operation of the TEbases. Over 2,000 log-ins were recorded, with fewer than a half-dozen students reporting difficulties. Most encouragingly, there was no evidence of any shortfall in grading or provision of feedback for any of the courses using TEbase, in marked contrast to the previous year’s experience with the Technology Competencies Database (Levin, Buell, & Levin, 1999; Levin & Buell, in press).

Whereas the TCD had used the ISTE/NCATE Foundation Standards directly as a basis for student-teacher interaction, the college’s curricular redesign afforded opportunities to create assignments in the methods courses which would embed the competencies in course assignments which had immediate, practical worth for teachers in training. In this manner, we could ensure that students would have repeated opportunities to encounter and work with each competency area over the two-year certification program.

Table 1 lists examples of assignments tracked in TEbase in the Fall semester, along with related ISTE/NCATE competencies.

Activity	Related ISTE/NCATE Competencies
Submit a polished group presentation of a mathematics investigation enriched by the use of Excel.	1.1.2: Use terminology related to computers and technology appropriately in written and oral communications. 1.2.1: Use productivity tools for word processing, database management, and spreadsheet applications.
Submit personal philosophy of mathematics via email. Access our course home page for specifics on assignments and ready access to readings, lessons, and sample portfolios.	1.2.3: Use computer-based technologies including telecommunications to access information and enhance personal and professional productivity. 1.2.4: Use computers to support problem solving, data collection, information management, communications, presentations, and decision making.
Read "Teaching with Technology" by Kevin M. Leander, located at http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/courses/ci235/ci301T.html. Describe how the technologies mentioned in this chapter would or would not be applicable to teaching in a high school or middle school social studies classroom.	1.1.5: Demonstrate knowledge of uses of computers and technology in business, industry, and society.
Locate a professional web site that you might use in your teaching. Describe the web site and type the URL in WebBoard.	1.2.7: Identify computer and related technology resources for facilitating lifelong learning and emerging roles of the learner and the educator.
Survey of Computers at Your Site	1.3.2: Describe current instructional principles, research, and appropriate assessment practices as related to the use of computers and technology resources in the curriculum.

A review of records showed that TEbase was used in the Fall semester to handle interactions for 22 activities. Five activities were completed by the elementary education majors, while among secondary education majors, the math group engaged in five, the English group in two, the social studies group in six, and the science group in four. Levels of achievement were mixed. The elementary majors all reached acceptable performance levels on all five of their activities. Among the social studies group, 94 percent completed their activities satisfactorily, and about 80 percent of the activities undertaken in the English group earned satisfactory or outstanding ratings. However, the math and science majors completed their activities with acceptable or outstanding marks close to 100 percent of the time with some assignments being submitted in the Spring semester. Overall, out of 924 student-activities combinations across the classes, students completed the activities satisfactorily in 891 instances, or about 96 percent.

Based on more extensive usage of TEbase in the Fall, instructors provided feedback and requested enhancements. These suggestions turned into a major revision of how different databases work together. TEbase v2.0 relies on a WebStar 3.0 HTML server, FileMaker Pro 4.0 and BlueWorld's Lasso 2.5 to provide a more flexible database to monitor both individual and group assignments, track students' progress over a two-year period, to accommodate unlimited numbers of students, instructors, courses, and assignment, and to provide a tool for faculty that is easy to modify and maintain. The major differences and additions in this new version include:

• An instructor can customize the course setup including adding or changing logo, icons, and standards; establish groups, add/remove students and enter other student information.
• One database contains all users in the program instead of separate databases for each course.
• Three ways for instructors to views assignments.
• Additional field for students to describe how their assignments fit with the standards identified.
• Private field for instructors to comment on students’ work that is not visible to the students.

A demonstration version of TEbase 2.0 is available at http://lrs.ed.uiuc.edu/TCD/tryout.html.

In Spring 1999, usage of TEbase across the six classes increased by about 35 percent — some 1,241 student-activities combinations were entered in the database for the Spring 1999 semester. This reflects an increase in the number of activities tracked with TEbase per student, since the same students and classes were using it as before. During this period, the database records show a rate for successful completion of about 80 percent (that is, in 980 instances out of the 1,241, students earned ratings of acceptable or outstanding on an activity). The elementary classes used TEbase to track seven activities; six math activities were tracked, along with five science activities, 11 social studies activities and four English teaching methods activities.

Table 2 provides examples of the activities tracked in TEbase in Spring 1999, along with related ISTE/NCATE competencies.

During Spring 1999, redesigned coding made it possible for us to track all students in a single database, rather than use a separate database for each course, and also permitted us to assign students in a class to groups for specific activities. These feature improvements were offset, however, by slower processing of database searches, resulting in somewhat reduced ease of use.

A pre-survey and post-survey were administered online via a web-based interface to the secondary pre-service teacher education students early in the fall and at the end of the school year. The students were asked about their experiences with educational technology, and their level of expertise with specific educational technologies. There were 147 responses to the pre-survey and 124 responses to the post-survey. The pre- and post-surveys were completed by 100% of the secondary students in the program at the time the surveys were administered. Table 3 displays median scores for both pre-surveys and post-surveys to identify changes in students’ use of technology.

The median scores show that students increased their use of technology in a number of different areas. Given the students’ level of experience with computing generally, it is perhaps not surprising that they adapted quite rapidly to using the TEbase. (Several of their instructors required more hand-holding.)

Within the class assignments, thirteen of the 18 ISTE/NCATE and 21 Illinois State Board of Education technology standards were addressed during the first year of the redesigned teacher certification program. These standards crossed all major areas of technology:

• 4 of 6 standards related to basic computer technology operations and concepts
• 5 of 8 standards related to the personal and professional use of technology
• 3 of 5 standards about the application of technology instruction
• and for the State of Illinois, 1 of 2 standards about social, ethical and human issues

Handler and Strudler (1997) recommend that the ISTE Foundation Standards be integrated systematically into the curricula of teacher preparation programs, in ways which might vary from one context to another. This has recently been reinforced by the national study conducted by ISTE of teacher education institutions (ISTE, 1999). Our experience provides strong support for this recommendation. Using the TCD in a way unintegrated into the teacher education program, the initial instructor and graduate assistant were unable to grade more than 50 percent of the 176 competencies descriptions submitted by their students even by the end of the school year. Using the integrated TEbase, the teachers and coordinator of the Fall, 1998 classes were able to grade 95 percent of their students’ submissions soon after the submissions were made. In the Spring semester of 1999, 80% were graded soon after the assignments were due. Individual differences between the uses of these two systems by teachers and students may account for some part of this, as may the shift from voluntary to required participation. Yet it appears likely that in large measure the improvement is due to the difference in activity types. The activities in the Technology Competencies Database were the ISTE/NCATE technology standards themselves, and students were instructed to complete these in any order they chose. The activities in the TEbase were the instructors’ own assignments, and these were due in a specific sequence on specific dates. We believe the improvement we have found offers strong evidence that it is more efficient to give instructors the leeway to set their own assignments in the TEbase linked to competencies than to require them to grade students’ direct submissions of evidence for completions of the competencies.

The TEbase mechanism performs several important bridging functions within UIUC’s redesigned teacher education curricula. First is the bridge between individual class activities and the ISTE/NCATE Foundation Standards. Methods instructors and the technology course instructor work together to construct assignments which promote learning in each competency area. Second is the bridge across courses — the TEbase functions as an electronic gradebook which operates much the same from one class to the next, permitting students and faculty members to track learning consistently across the two-year program. Furthermore, the TEbase offers a bridge between individual learning experiences and a coherent body of knowledge. At the individual level, this coherence takes the form of an electronic portfolio that each student can point to as documentation of their learning about educational technology. At the social level, the TEbase feature for automatically publishing exemplary work allows students to contribute to a high quality web resource that grows into something of value not only to the particular students and faculty, but to the educational world more generally.

There is a great deal more to be learned about the workings of web-enabled databases and how they can be adapted further to ensure that the promise of instructional reform contained in a redesigned teacher education curricula is in fact met. For this reason, we will be embarking on more formal evaluation procedures, to investigate in an unbiased manner whether the benefits we think are occurring really are. Our plan of action so far has been a continuing cycle of design-evaluation-adaptation. We believe this general plan represents the best manner of attaining an optimal match of resources and curriculum.

This is another case in which the uses of appropriate technologies in support of systemic reform efforts can generate more powerful and sustainable change than either used alone. Uses of technology without systemic reform tend to be driven by technology developments without an overall guiding principal. Reform efforts without the uses of technology are difficult to institute and maintain. The combination can create major positive change in the education of teachers and in education more broadly.

Brehm, B., Moran, J., Bievenue, L., Andris, J., Handler, M., Levin, J., & Payne, A. (1997). Integrating technology into teacher and administrator preparation programs: Five models in Illinois. IASCD Journal, 34(1), 11-16.

Handler, M. G., & Strudler, N. (1997). The ISTE Foundation Standards: Issues of implementation. Journal of Computing in Teacher Education,13(2), 16-23.

International Society for Technology in Education. (1999). Will new teachers be prepared to teach in a digital age? A national survey on information technology in teacher education . Santa Monica: Milken Family Foundation.

National Center for Education Statistics. (1999). Internet access in public schools and classrooms: 1994-98. Washington, DC: U. S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement.

Levin, B. B. (1996). Using portfolios to fulfill ISTE/NCATE technology requirements for preservice teacher candidates. Journal of Computing in Teacher Education, 12(3), 13-20.

Levin, J., Buell, J., & Waugh, M. (1998). Computer Supported Collaborative Evaluation: Teaching Teleapprenticeships and the redesign of teacher education. [Online at http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/people/jim-levin/lbw.aera98/]. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Diego CA.

Levin, S. R., & Buell, J. G. (in press). Merging technology into teacher education: Technology tools and faculty collaboration. . Journal of Computing in Teacher Education.

Levin, S. R., Buell, J. G., & Levin, J. A. (1999). TEbase: Connecting pre-service teachers and technologies via web-enabled databases. Proceedings of the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education SITE ’99 Conference (pp. 1865-1870). San Antonio, TX.

National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, Task Force on Technology and Teacher Education. (1997). Technology and the new professional teacher: Preparing for the 21st century classroom. Washington DC.

Office of Technology Assessment (OTA). (April 1995). Teachers and technology: Making the connection. (OTA-EHR-616) Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. [Although the OTA report is out of print, it may be downloaded from the Web at http://www.wws.princeton.edu/~ota/disk1/1995/9541.html .]

We would like to thank Michael Waugh, Ed Malczewski, and Keith Garrett for their work on initial efforts to develop the TCD web-based software tool and Brian Pianfetti and Qiang Sun for their work on TEbase v2.0.  We want to thank the teacher education faculty and students and the CTER OnLine faculty and students in the College of Education at UIUC for their patience in using TEbase and CTERbase and their suggestions for improvement. This research was supported in part by grants from the Illinois Board of Higher Education, the Illinois State Board of Education and University of Illinois OnLine.