Abstract:

It is an indisputable fact that teachers must move in the edge of science and technology, then is necessary to introduce the emerging and new technologies for teachers. They must always refresh and expand their knowledge, skills and attitudes in science and technology. It means, if teachers know or familiar with the newest developments in the science and technology fields, they will be able to integrate them in their educational activities and so motivate and guide their students toward mainstream of evolution of science and technologies.

One of the new subjects in the science and technology area is nano science and technology. In the pioneer counties, this new field is integrated into the k-12 formal education and they designed educational plans for in-service teacher training.

This study investigated the nano science and technology educational approaches have been adopted for in-service teacher training in the pioneer countries. The selected samples were Islamic republic of Iran, United States of America, Australia, and Taiwan. The aim of this work is proposing a native approach for Iran regarding the equipments and geographical distributions.

In Islamic republic of Iran, the obtained results showed the training approaches were including holding annual conferences and workshops; virtual forum, and introducing digital resources for teachers (mainly offline). The important point was that these programs were not coherent and consistently.

In United States of America the training approaches were visiting the laboratory and laboratory activities; workshops; face to face training; virtual training such as introducing online and offline digital resources (films, lesson plans, educational kits…); virtual forums and virtual labs.
In Australia training approaches were online introducing digital resources (such as slides and films educational kits and teacher guides, training modules online training) and educational webminars
Taiwan was one the pioneer in Asia, and performed many different programs, such as: training pioneer teachers in America and employment them in Taiwan as designers and lecturers for educational program and training other teachers, respectively; Laboratory activities; workshops and conferences; discussions with experts after conference and workshops, introducing digital learning resources (deploy online and offline).

According to the obtained results, it was found that for in-service teacher training in new field (science and technologies) which faces with lack of adequate resources (expert human and equipments) as a crisis, the best approach is blended learning (combining face to face and virtual learning).

For this aim, a native model was proposed for in-service teacher training in nano science and technology that was based on blended learning approach (with regarding the geographical distributions, local resources including human and equipments resources. In this model according to the sources, Iran's 31 provinces are divided into two groups: local provinces and central provinces. In local provinces the in service teacher training will be followed blended learning (face to face + virtual) and in central provinces the training will be mainly laboratory activities and face to face learning approach.

Keywords:

Nano science and technology, in-service teacher training, blended learning.