Customer Reviews

Curriculum Webs: A Practical Guide to Weaving the Web into Teaching and Learning

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Harnessing the World Wild Web to enhance and expand curriculum and students access to knowledge and constructive information have become an important and viable vehicle to me as a school administrator. However, using this tool efficiently and educationally poses many challenges and requires new training for teachers and schools. I have found Cunningham An Billinsley's Curriculum Webs to be a rare, unique and excellent guide for educators and school administrators in preparing them to explore, utilize and maximize the benefits the web has to offer to education, as well as in creating their own units and webs for practically every subject matter and curricular area. The book takes you step by step through all the essential stages and components in the process of creating a traditional curriculum and applies them to the creation of a web based curricular unit. Its web companion provides and interactive hands-on way to easily implement the newly acquired skills, In addition to the ease and clarity it presents from a technical standpoint, it offers wonderful insights about instructional methods and strategies, based on the most current research in the field of learning and education. The book is delightful to read, uses relevant examples, is easily applicable, and is reflective and thought provoking. A must for teachers, teachers to be, and parents who wish to use the great possibilities of virtual learning to enhance their children's critical thinking skills, knowledge, individual growth, progress, and pursuit of personal interests.

There is now a second edition of the book, available on Amazon.Com, ISBN 0205459404. It's a better book in a lot of ways, partly based on user feedback, and partly on changes in the technology. Check it out.

Check- subject matter expertise.
Check- use of the web for learning (whether academic, professional, self-directed, or corporate)
Check- understanding of the key issues.

Now you need a resource showing you how to make it all work effectively, and give you new ideas. This is where Curriculum Webs fits in- whether corporate HR intranet or K12 science projects, or anywhere in-between.

`Curriculum Webs' is clear, well-illustrated and thorough, with lots of examples giving you the confidence to move forward.

Chapters span:
- planning- context, process
- curriculum goals- learners, subject, pre-requisites, rationales
- learning activities- individualizing, grouping, activities
- gathering web resources- bookmarks, searching, evaluation (m, copyright issues
- designing effective websites- audience, information and materials, visual metaphors, navigation, chunking
- laying out web pages- design, white space, colo(u)r, styles, moving, frames/tables
- multimedia
- interactivity
- organizing ands assessing learning
- evaluating and maintaining curriculum webs
-teaching
- teaching teachers- training, standards, organizations
- appendix- servers, clients, browsers, bandwidth, names/URLs, html

Note: steers away from eLearning hype (although misses opportunity for entertaining eLearning anecdotal sidebars!).

Overall, a very worthwhile, vendor neutral, action-focused workbook on practical eLearning.