Web-based Teacher Professional Development Support Platform

Nowadays, Professional Development of Teachers has been the trend of the international education of teachers in the world, as well as in China.The teachers should master not only the knowledge of courses, pedagogy, and psychology, but also the knowledge of practice in teaching. The knowledge of courses, pedagogy, and psychology, which we called explicit knowledge, is easy to get. But the knowledge of practice in teaching, which we call tacit knowledge, is hard to develop. The best way to develop the tacit knowledge is communicating and sharing the practice of teaching with others in a learning community of teachers.With the development of information technology, it becomes possible to offer the training courses in Internet. We can organize web-based learning communities to foster the communication and the learning of teachers in easy ways, and promote the leaning of teachers from the other teachers and the training experts in the communities.We build the platform of teachers' professional development based on the theories of collaborative learning, learning community, and teachers' professional development. In order to enhance the intelligence of the platform, we embed the technologies of Agents, workflow management, and communication technology in groups in the platform. The platform also offers services, such as BLOG, portfolios of development, and tools of analysis for video-teaching cases, to help the professional development of teachers.The paper describes the routes of design and development of the platform and proves the validity and credibility of the platform in teachers' training based the analysis of one of trainings in the platform, named the theory and practice of cognitive apprenticeship.