Preface

Who Should Read this Book?
How to Use this Book
What this Book Is and What It Is Not
Enhancements in the Second Edition

This book helps teachers, curriculum developers, and teachers-in-training to utilize the World Wide Web as a central resource to facilitate learning.

The title of the book refers to curriculum webs. A curriculum web is a web page or pages designed to support a curriculum, or a “plan for a sustained process of teaching and learning” (Pratt, 1994, 5). This book describes the process of building curriculum webs from the early planning stages through to design of the web pages, and using the finished product in classrooms. It also includes discussion of WebQuests, a simple form of curriculum web that makes it easy for teachers to begin to use the Web more effectively with their students.

The contents of this book reflect our understanding of what preservice and inservice teachers and other educators need to learn how to create curriculum webs. This understanding arises from eight years of experience training teachers in the Web Institute for Teachers, an intensive summer professional development experience hosted by the University of Chicago.

The effective use of the Web to support teaching and learning requires ongoing attention to explicit reflection and planning. Only such reflection and planning will produce desired learning outcomes—knowledge, skills, and attitudes—in diverse students in a rapidly changing world. A successful teacher or other web-based curriculum developer understands the phases of curriculum development and routinely considers a range of issues involved in building web sites to support the needs of learners while taking advantage of the ever-expanding possibilities of the Web. He or she also pays careful attention to how the curriculum web is used by learners, and makes ongoing modifications in order to help a range of learners to reach desired outcomes. Through participation in this cycle of creation and reflection, he or she exemplifies what it means to be a professional educator.

On the companion web site, curriculumwebs.com, you will find example curriculum webs that can serve as an inspiration to you as you work toward creating your own curriculum web, as well as a series of Hands-On Lessons that will teach you the basic steps of creating a curriculum web using several popular web-page editors.

Who Should Read this Book?

Anyone who wants to increase student learning will want to learn how to build curriculum webs.

This book will be helpful to teachers in schools and those who are learning to teach, curriculum developers working for educational organizations such as school districts and museums, and parents who are homeschooling their children. Our greatest hope is that this book will help individual teachers or groups of teachers who want to create webs to support unique or locally significant learning activities, or educators who want to take advantage of variably occurring “teachable moments” that crop up continuously in their local community or in the global village. We also hope that nonschool curriculum developers, who create web-based learning materials for federal, state, and local agencies, non­profit organizations, historical sites, parks, and museums will read this book and use its concepts and procedures to produce more effective materials.

We believe that every teacher should know how to build web pages to support their ongoing teaching as well as the unexpected learning needs and specialized interests of their particular students. A basic familiarity with computers, a willingness to put time and energy into planning and design, and this book are all that is required.

We use the words teacher, planner, developer, and designer more or less interchangeably in this book. The only difference between the first and the other two is that teachers will be developing the curriculum knowing that they will actually be using it with their students, and so we expect teachers to be the most diligent, careful, and effective curriculum developers and web designers of all.

How to Use this Book

This book includes all the information you need to plan effective learning activities on the Web. The Hands-On Lessons found on the companion web site at curriculumwebs.com provide software-specific instructions that guide you through the actual process of constructing the pages of your curriculum web.

The best way to use this book is to read it from beginning to end, doing the activities along the way and completing the appropriate Hands-On Lesson after reading each chapter. In a series of professional development workshops or a college course the participants could read one chapter and complete one Hands-On Lesson per week. If you are using the book on your own, you might want to read all of the chapters first, and then cycle back to the Hands-On Lessons, referring to the book again to learn more about general principles and procedures related to the lessons.

Each chapter includes several features designed to help you learn:

• Overview: provides a summary of what will be covered in the chapter.
• Activities: solidify your understanding of key concepts or procedures along the way.
• Question(s) for reflection: helps you to think about the content of the book in terms of larger questions having to do with professional and personal growth.
• Your next step: suggests how to use the Hands-On Lessons that accompany the book and prepares you for subsequent chapters
• Chapter summary: reviews what was covered in the chapter.
• For further learning: guides you to additional print and web resources. Full citations are listed in the References at the end of the book.

In addition to the chapters, this book contains a number of features that will helpyou:

• The appendix (An Overview of Web Technologies) tells you everything you need to know about web servers, bandwidth, file names, and other technical aspects of using the Internet. Read this appendix if you find yourself at sea with some of the terms or concepts that we assume of our readers.
• The glossary contains definitions for words that appear in boldface the first time they are introduced in the book or in the lessons. A lot of nontechnical terms are also included here as a way of demystifying some philosophical and pedagogical concepts found throughout this book.
• An extensive set of references includes citations for all the sources consulted in preparing this book. Citations in author-date format are given through the text.
• An extensive index is useful if you want to use this book as hypertext (you’ll find a definition in the Glossary); that is, if you want to use it as a reference tool rather than read it from cover to cover.

What this Book Is and What It Is Not

This book covers the entire process of planning curriculum, creating web pages and using web pages to support teaching, so readers will be able to benefit from this book even if they have never created a web page or used the Web with students.

Successful use of this book has several prerequisites. We assume that you are computer literate. The book therefore does not cover basic computer skills such as saving, copying, and deleting files, installing hardware or software, or connecting your computer to the Internet. We assume that you are already familiar with operating your computer, creating folders or directories, saving and moving files, and browsing the Internet. (For some background on these topics, see the Appendix.) We also assume you are comfortable and excited about learning new approaches to using the computer (even if you are a little intimidated). You do not have to know anything at all about building web pages.

We provide detailed guidance and step-by-step procedures for using popular web-page editors such as Macromedia Dreamweaver, Microsoft FrontPage, and Mozilla Composer in a series of Hands-On Lessons, available at curriculumwebs.com/lessons. These lessons tell you exactly what buttons to press or what menu choices to select—in all of these software programs—to produce the essential design elements of curriculum webs. We do not cover every function of the more advanced software packages, but the lessons cover numerous procedures and include advice for learning more.

Even if you are a computer wiz, fully versed in web design, you can still benefit from our coverage of curriculum planning, learning activities, assessment and evaluation, and using the Web with students. Web-page designers can use this book to help them reflect on and design better learning environments.

The book itself does not include any click steps, and only a few addresses of web sites. The Web is evolving so rapidly that web site contents and addresses often change or become obsolete. We want this book to remain useful even as specific resources change or become unavailable. We have included a few web sites that have maintained their same address for at least two years and are maintained by established organizations and are thus likely to remain stable. You can find many additional links to relevant online resources on our companion web site at curriculumwebs.com. We encourage you to send us additional resources if you find them useful.

Enhancements in the Second Edition

This new edition of Curriculum Webs includes several important enhancements that reflect the feedback from our readers and what we have learned from our ongoing work with teachers and others who are developing curriculum webs. The order of the chapters has been changed to reflect better the sequence of steps that the developers of curriculum webs actually follow when they work. A new chapter (Chapter Two) has been added covering WebQuests and other activity formats for using the Web to enhance teaching and learning. Greater attention has been given throughout to the importance of teacher reflection and continuous improvement. Each chapter includes one or more Questions for Reflection to encourage this important process. We’ve included more examples throughout the book and on the companion web site at curriculumwebs.com. We’ve added many new activities to support the application and practice that will truly teach you how to create a dynamic and effective curriculum web. The Hands-On Lessons have been completely rewritten to reflect our new sequence of topics and procedures, and to incorporate changes in the software. All of the content has been updated to reflect current technologies. We pay a lot more attention to CSS, and have included a CSS reference on the companion web site. Our HTML Reference has been moved from the book to the web site to make it easier to use and to allow more space in the book for discussion of streaming audio and video and new approaches to interactivity. The References have been updated and expanded, as have the Glossary and the Index.

We believe the second edition is a stronger and more useful book. We hope you agree.