This paper examines the impacts of technology (e.g., Chromebooks, Google Drive) on teacher learning and student activity in the development and implementation of a deeply digital high school biology unit. Using design-based implementation research, teachers co-designed with researchers and curriculum specialists a student-centered unit aligned to the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) that utilizes classroom technology. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected to understand the barriers that inhibit the implementation of a digital curriculum as well as the extent that teachers engage in the design process and begin to make shifts in their practice. We found that through the co-design process teachers began to shift their knowledge of NGSS, technology implementation, and adapted to tensions and barriers inherent in the process.

The current study analyzed the impact of a year-long adoption of an online curriculum planning tool on teachers’ thinking about content and pedagogy, as well as their use of technology in the classroom. The online planning tool was adopted district-wide following professional development training with the purpose of supporting teachers’ development of differentiated, student-centered instruction with digital resources. Structured interviews with high school science teachers were used to determine how teachers’ thinking about key concepts and instruction changed during the course of technology adoption. Verbal protocol analysis was used to code interviews, using comprehension theory and national reform approaches in science teaching to develop a framework that coded teachers’ interview responses as more constructive (student-centered) or more directed (teacher-centered). Results showed that teachers increased their discussion of constructive pedagogical strategies and reduced the degree to which they focused on directed uses of technology. No change was seen in teachers’ domain knowledge across the adoption process, but teachers with deeper domain knowledge were more likely to spontaneously integrate technology into their discussion of domain concepts and pedagogical strategies. Overall, findings demonstrate teachers’ adoption of an online curriculum planning tool in a supported context can have important impacts on their instructional approaches. ONLINE CURRICULUM PLANNING TOOL 3 Facilitating Teachers’ Thinking about Pedagogy and Technology with an Online Curriculum Planning Tool

This paper describes the results of a study designed to assess human expert ratings of educational concept features for use in automatic core concept extraction systems. Digital library resources provided the content base for human experts to annotate automatically extracted concepts on seven dimensions: coreness, local importance, topic, content, phrasing, structure, and function. The annotated concepts were used as training data to build a machine learning classifier as part of a tool used to predict the core concepts in the document. These predictions were compared with the experts' judgment of concept coreness.

Educational standards are a central focus of the current educational system in the United States, underpinning educational practice, curriculum design, teacher professional development, and high-stakes testing and assessment. Digital library users have requested that this information be accessible in association with digital learning resources to support teaching and learning as well as accountability requirements. Providing this information is complex because of the variability and number of standards documents in use at the national, state, and local level. This article describes a cataloging tool that aids catalogers in the assignment of standards metadata to digital library resources, using natural language processing techniques. The research explores whether the standards suggestor service would suggest the same standards as a human, whether relevant standards are ranked appropriately in the result set, and whether the relevance of the suggested assignments improve when, in addition to resource content, metadata is included in the query to the cataloging tool. The article also discusses how this service might streamline the cataloging workflow.

We demonstrate a prototype Curriculum Customization Service designed and developed with significant teacher input. This prototype illustrates a model for embedding digital library resources into mainstream classroom use. A 10 week pilot study suggests that this Service can increase teachers' use of digital library resources in their class, and encourage them to use resources to customize instruction.

The limited scope of digital libraries can be attributed to the brick and mortar vision of the library metaphor. In order to extend scope of digital libraries, in this chapter we examine the current supports and future possibilities afforded by digital libraries to support conventional consumers (i.e., information- users and information-curators), as well as emerging new types of consumers such as distributed computer applications. A functional analysis of conventional libraries is coupled with metaphor design methodology to explore new promising applications and usage scenarios for digital libraries.

While there is a strong movement to develop new educational resources to bring students to the competencies represented by educational content standards, it is recognized that there are vast repositories of educational resources already developed that are suitable to address those competencies. However, these resources need to be indexed by national and state standards to make them accessible for teachers who are increasingly required to teach to certain educational standards (Diekema and Chen, 2005). In the early 1980s, a perceived a crisis in the American education system encouraged the creation of national standards by professional subject-area organizations such as the National Council for Teachers of Mathematics. These national standards aimed to clearly define what students in certain grade levels are expected to know in core subject areas (Ratvitch, 1995). Eventually all states followed suit and published their own educational standards, often using the national standards as a guideline.

The Digital Water Education Library collection (DWEL) is being generated by primary and secondary school teachers in the United States. This complex process involves both individual research and team design, and the use of a variety of online tools, such as an online cataloguing tool. Interactions amongst DWEL members are being ethnographically analysed in order to identify requirements for further development of these tools. The analysis suggests that many DWEL members envision their work as occurring in an integrated environment with stable documents, a situation which is not supported by the current configuration of DWEL tools. The design implications of these findings are reviewed.