| Abstract: | The vastness of the World Wide Web is both its attraction and its challenge. For people with a high-speed connection, plenty of time, and experience with technology, the Web can be a wonderful resource. Unfortunately, most teachers needing instructional resources for their classrooms do not have these assets. LEARN NC was created with this mainstream of teachers in mind, and to a great extent we have made the Web more accessible to them. Although we cannot give them more or faster Internet connections, we can help them make more efficient use of the time they have by making resources easy to use and providing training. We have been most successful when we have been able to “boil down” the content of the World Wide Web into a more manageable form. This requires a difficult balancing act: in order to provide as much good educational content as possible, we are constantly expanding our resources, but this growing content must be kept manageable and easy to access, or teachers will not be willing or able to use it. As a result, we must continually refine our existing resources. With these refinements, we believe—and our participating teachers concur—that our “one-stop-shopping” approach to educational technology is a helpful one for teachers and can provide a useful model for educators elsewhere |
