Promoting elementary school teachers' professional development by e-teacher community competition

The Educational Bureau of Hualien County (abbreviated as EBHC) in the eastern part of Taiwan plays important roles in promoting school teachers' professional development by holding an “e-teacher community competition” (abbreviated as ETCC) since February 2008. The participants not only designed and implemented a theme-based course, but also presented the processes and their final products over a unique web-site assigned to each e-teacher team. All final products of the participating e-teacher teams can be accessed from the EBHC platform (http://teacher.hlc.edu.tw/index.asp?m=Welcome!) that served as scaffolding for other school teachers in the local county as references of course design and collaborative teaching. The educational administration of EBHC played important roles in setting up rules and regulations of ETCC, inviting university professors to serve as curriculum and information technology (abbreviated as IT) expert consultants to revise the rules and to evaluate the performance of the participating teams after they finished the final products. EBHC also provided attractive and useful rewards for the winning teams. The outcomes showed that the participating teachers had better communication among the team members, and they cooperatively accomplished an on-line theme-based course and implemented in the classroom and outdoors teaching. Teachers' professional development included the growth in the content knowledge, capabilities of course-design, IT application and collaborative teaching. The ETCC may serve as a new teacher training model for the educational administration agencies.