A portable authoring tool 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, and play their multimedia materials in classrooms under a limited-bandwidth transmission environment. Educators need productivity tools for organizing lesson plans and presenting their collected materials off-line; moreover, they need 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. This study designed and prototyped a portable authoring tool based on 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. PSP maintains information for finding pedagogical resources distributed on the internet and provides query and browsing mechanisms to explore what is available. The portable authoring tool are included for tailoring retrieved resources, creating supplementary materials, and designing innovative curriculum. Additionally, The framework also explores and demonstrates how the i- - nternet shapes and is shaped by classroom practices.