Learning & Leading Through Technology

By Dave Gladney

Time To Ta

g

The internet made personalized learning easier by giving teachers access to educational materials in a wide variety of formats for every type of learner. Now the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative

will make it possible to actually find what you need in the midst of the information overload.

AGE/GRADE LEVEL

Middle school teacher Tara Thompson is look- ing for some resources to help sixth grader Sammy Smith, who is struggling with the concept of multiplying fractions. She types the search term multiplying fractions into Google and receives more than 4. 1 million results in less than a second. These include—on the first page alone—lesson plans, worksheets, You Tube videos, and games. Thompson is frustrated. Sifting through all that content to find just the right resources to meet Sammy’s specific learning needs seems like the virtual version of finding a needle in a haystack.

Teacher-librarian Dale Folkins of Chattahoochee
High School in Johns Creek, Georgia, USA, knows
exactly how she feels. He summed it up this way:
“Searching with Google is like drinking water out of
a fire hydrant. You need to find ways to filter results.”
Folkins’s response was typical of the feedback that
the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LMRI,
www.lrmi.net) received during its Easy Access and
Search for Education (EASE, www.lrmi.net/ease)
awareness campaign (see “Learning with LRMI” on
page 18). It also mirrored the feedback the LRMI
received on an earlier survey of educators and edu-
cational publishers: Information overload has made
it too difficult to find the right materials at the right
time among an estimated 10 billion—and growing—
indexed webpages. The internet and search engines
may have revolutionized education, but it’s time for an
update that will make it easier for both teachers and
students to find what they are looking for.

The internet and search engines may have
revolutionized education, but it’s time for an
update that will make it easier for both teachers
and students to find what they are looking for.

Here are a few of the common search needs that educators identified during the EASE campaign ( www.lrmi.net/ease-comments):

• The ability to group results by grade or age level

• The ability to search by alignment to specific standards

• A rating system for resources based on quality or appropriateness

• The ability to sort search results by topic or category

• A way for search engines to provide information
about how resources are used and in what context
The LRMI survey also found that publishers consider
the internet essential for helping educators find their mate-
rials. With both educators and educational publishers ask-
ing for online search capabilities that allow users to
filter results according to specific categories, such as con-
tent/subject area, age/grade level, alignment to specific
standards, intended user, and resource type, there is an
abundant need for improved online searches for instruc-
tional resources.