Vertical Web Portals in Primary Education

Abstract

Advances in digital technologies and proliferation of the Internet as an ubiquitous platform for communication and information open up new opportunities for teaching and learning in the 21st century. In the past decade, K-12 schools have made considerable investments in the educational technology infrastructure, as evident by the decrease in students-per-computer ratios from 10.8 to 4 in a 10-year period between 1994 and 2004 (Robelen, Cavanagh, Tonn, & Honawar, 2005). However, while the investments in computing infrastructure have been steadily increasing, teachers’ training and the integration of technologies into the elementary school classrooms have lagged far behind the infrastructure investments (Ivers & Barron, 1999). One strategy to address the technology gap between teachers and their students is to develop customized grade-level Web portals for elementary classrooms, and to train teachers to maintain and integrate Web portals into the teaching-learning processes of their schools (Preiser-Houy, Navarrete, & Russell, 2005).