October 2006 Volume 9 Number 4

(The headings and titles on the
teaching material page are
shown on the right, which
includes the pictures and URL
hyperlinks collected by the
teacher for students’ reference.)
Analysis of interview content
2. Important measures at the beginning of the new dynasty
3. Cheng Ho’s voyages to the West
4. Chief Minister Chang Chu-cheng and his “integrated taxation” scheme
5. History champion (This section contains challenging questions that the
teacher poses on the Web.)
The summarization and analysis of the interviews with participating teachers reveal information about
experiences and feelings caused by using different media for teaching material design. All four teachers in the
experimental group showed satisfaction with the friendly environment provided by the proposed system, and
agreed that the web editor and notepad are easy to use, thereby saving time during Web search. Regarding the
notepad, the teachers indicated that everything returned from any single search could be easily retrieved later for
the production of various instructional materials. As teacher A put it,
“…it’s quite a handy tool for editing. It’s just like writing your own lesson plans or reorganizing
various elements. In fact, the moment you start using the notepad, you feel its handiness…I never
thought it would be this easy because in the past when I used the Internet, I used to open a window for
Word on the side so that I could cut and paste along the way. Usually I had to do a lot of dragging and
pasting. After I have searched for a while I would tell myself that it is time to start editing…which I
usually spent an awful lot of time on, so by the time I finished editing and tried to get back to where I
left off searching, boy!...Where was I? What else is left for me to supplement with extra material? So I
find this tool really saves me a lot of time.”
Teachers also consider the URL databank helpful and convenient to their online search effort. As teacher C
comments,
“…I think in terms of teaching resource collection. This tool is more convenient because the
information in the databank is already sorted and so contains more relevant websites. That’s why it is
convenient. You can save a lot of time with this databank because you no longer need to weed out
totally irrelevant websites that pop up during your Web search. For example when you type in a few
keywords, sometimes it returns over 200 results, many of them mixed with English and Chinese. It is
very frustrating….”
Teachers further indicated that the proposed system helps them compare different units, which, in turn, promotes
coherent and integrated thinking, offers inspiration, and increases creativity for teaching material design during
their Web search. During their interview, teachers B and D related
Teacher B: “…one of its strengths is that you can store a series of notepads…and retrieve them later,
which makes comparing and connecting units easier.”
Teacher D: “…when gathering information becomes easier, you usually get more inspiration….”
The four teachers in the control group admitted during their interviews that searching the Web for teaching
resources is no easy task. One of the difficulties cited is that the search engines available often return many links
that are totally irrelevant to what is needed. As a result they have to spend a lot of time screening the links one
by one and sometimes have to visit a website to determine if the information is indeed useful. Many times their
search returns with information that is totally unexpected. Teachers in this group also agreed that computer
technology can provide a complement to conventional written texts because it allows concurrent display of text
and graphics.
Discussion and conclusions
The role of information technology is becoming more important in the instructional environment. However, the
lack of appropriate software for instructional purposes inhibits the process of integrating technology with
instruction. To compensate for this lack, we developed a web-based teaching material design and development
system and tested its effectiveness in helping in-service teachers develop their teaching plans and materials. We
hope that the facilities and friendly user interface of the system will be able to reduce teachers’ workloads and
increase the quality of teaching plans and materials designed on the Internet.
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