A pedagogical service for organizing and indexing curricular materials

Internet use has been encouraged for K-12 students in Taiwan, and many educators would like to break through the confines of traditional textbook-centered teaching to present activities that encourage students to explore and construct their own knowledge. But many educators are not well prepared to teach curricular materials in form of multimedia with the internet, and internet use is limited in scope and substance. Since this requires developing innovative materials and curriculum tailored to local students, educators have neither the time nor the information to do much of this from scratch. The internet provides a medium for sharing innovative pedagogical resources broadly. Governmental projects and educator organizations have already begun to post curriculum ideas on internet servers. However, it is difficult to obtain the right resources that meet specific needs. Educators need productivity tools for locating sites of materials by surfing the network, searching the individual curricular sources, adapting retrieved materials to their classrooms, organizing these resources in coherent lesson plans, and sharing their experiences across the internet. This study designed and prototyped a Pedagogical Service Platform (PSP) that provides authoring and presentation supports for educators so they can make effective use of contemporary pedagogical resources posted on the internet by Taiwanese governmental agencies. These interact with the fundamental challenges of teaching to support wide variation in internet use. The framework also explores and demonstrates how the internet shapes and is shaped by classroom practices. In addition, the needs of users illustrated in user case are motivated, and what has been experienced from designing PSP is discussed.