their teacher preparation program. In essence, they
are building and flying the aircraft at the same time.
Kauffman et al. (2002) report new teachers are
receiving little or no guidance about what to teach
and how to teach it despite learning about standards-
based instruction in their credential programs. The
cornerstone of special education for students who
require additional services to access the general
education curriculum is the Individualized Education
Plan (IEP), and every student must have a plan
written specifically to meet their individualized
needs. In turn, new teachers must create lesson plans
that include objectives aligned with IEP goals and
state content area standards. In addition,
instructional strategies to address lesson plan
objectives must be evidence-based, meaning they are
promising or proven effective strategies. Finding and
implementing empirically sound instructional
strategies and interventions is a tall order for special
education teachers who enter the field and their own
classrooms (at the same time they begin a teacher
preparation program) with little or no pedagogical
training and less content knowledge in challenging
areas such as science and math than their general
education peers (Boe, Shin, & Cook, 2007). They
face the immense challenges of learning and
teaching new content areas, and identifying
appropriate strategies to address their students’
various learning challenges. Adding to the stress,
credential candidates who are also first year teachers
are overwhelmed with university work in addition to
designing classroom activities. Our technological
tools can assist teachers in becoming immediately
effective in the classroom by addressing these
pressing needs: a) developing an efficient system to
manage the numerous tasks required by a university
credential program, which includes providing
evidence of demonstrated competence in all areas of
teaching; and b) providing support in writing
effective, evidence-based lesson plans.
In this paper, we describe our ongoing work on
designing and developing a web-based tool that
consists of two major parts: E-portfolio Manager and
Lesson Plan Creator. The E-portfolio Manager
provides a simple-to-use web-based service that
manages credential candidates’ progress throughout
their university credential program by placing
critical pedagogical and administrative information
at the fingertips of candidates, educators and
administrators. A portfolio is an essential part of a
candidates’ credential program in that it serves as
both a tool to reflect on one’s developing
pedagogical skills, and a tool to demonstrate mastery
of the teaching standards required by each state.
Prior to the development of electronic portfolios,
candidates were overwhelmed with the collection of
paper documents that resulted in a cumbersome
three to five inch binder. Our system moves paper-
based assignments, artifacts and evaluation forms,
typical requirements of many U.S. university
credential awarding programs, into digital format for
efficient management and assessment of credential
candidate work. The collected digital data is
organized in a searchable database with an intuitive
user interface. Additionally, the system collects
statistical data for improving our program, thus
increasing quality of teaching. This system is
designed specifically to meet the needs of program
candidates who previously tried to use a commercial
program with similar capabilities. However,
candidates found the commercial program to be
extremely difficult to use, unwieldy, costly, and
unable to change to meet developing state and
federal teacher requirements.
The Lesson Plan Creator, a basic tool for new
teachers to efficiently create evidence-based lesson
plans, is embedded in the larger management
system. Our system assists in accomplishing the
federal requirement of locating and implementing
evidence-based instruction that often takes teachers
hours to find. Our first step is development of the
educational strategy search engine. Here we address
the design and implementation of an education
research article search engine. This tool links the
IEP goals to specific content standards and allows
users to issue a specialized search of literature
databases to locate research articles that provide
information about evidence-based content-specific
strategies at chosen grade levels. We accomplish this
task by building a client-server web-system that
includes relational databases for the content standard
using MySQL. As an example, we discuss an
implementation specific for California Content
Standards (CACS). Though the United States
Department of Education initiated a website in 2002,
What Works Clearinghouse, to source scientific
evidence for what works in education, their strict
requirements for inclusion as an evidence-based
empirical study prohibit many promising effective
strategies from being included (What Works
Clearinghouse, 2009). Addressing this shortcoming,
we created our system to enable teachers to examine
peer-reviewed journal articles that report on both
proven and promising strategies that may have been
tested in randomized controlled trials as well as
smaller pilot, single subject, or qualitative studies.
Our technological design may benefit all teacher
preparation programs, thereby moving beyond our
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