SHARE GLOBALLY, ADAPT LOCALLY - SOFTWARE ASSISTANCE TO LOCATE AND TAILOR CURRICULUM POSTED TO THE INTERNET

Many teachers yearn to break through the confines of traditional textb ook-centered teaching to present activities that encourage students to explore and construct their own knowledge. But this requires developi ng innovative materials and curriculum tailored to local students. Tea chers have neither the time nor the information to do much of this fro m scratch. The Internet provides a medium for sharing innovative educa tional resources globally. School districts acid teacher organizations have already begun to post curriculum ideas on Internet servers. Howe ver, just storing unrelated educational materials on the Internet does not by itself solve the problem. It is too hard to find the right res ources to meet specific needs. Teachers need productivity software for locating sites of materials across the network, searching the individ ual curriculum sources, adapting retrieved materials to their classroo ms, organizing these resources in coherent lesson plans, and sharing t heir experiences across the internet. We have designed and prototyped a Teacher's Curriculum Assistant (TCA) that provides software support for teachers to make effective use of educational resources posted to the Internet. TCA maintains information for finding educational resour ces distributed on the Internet. It provides query and browsing mechan isms for exploring what is available. Tools are included for tailoring retrieved resources, creating supplementary materials, and designing innovative curriculum. TCA encourages teachers to annotate and upload successfully used curriculum to internet servers to share their ideas with other teachers. In this paper we motivate the need for such compu ter support and discuss what we have learned from designing TCA.