With Our Teachers Portland has a group of teachers on special assignment to help with curriculum development and staff training. Adoption of best practices in technology integration have been slow to take root. A conscious effort was made on the part of Instructional Technology staff to reach out to the curriculum departments and offer our services to help them begin to put up their staff development materials on the web, and to also develop systems that made this process easy for curriculum staff. By providing quality content to teachers, we hope to also help them become more comfortable with the technology and by becoming more comfortable, make the necessary steps to successfully integrate technology into instruction.
Manila is a content management tool that allows for the easy creation and maintenance of web sites.
Manila is used by curriculum staff and allows them to share their content with our teachers via the web. While many have discovered this, many are also frustrated by the high learning curve associated with creating and maintaining a classroom or department web site. Many commercial sites have been developed that allow teachers to easily create a web site using nothing but a browser interface. While useful tools, many schools are weary of the commercial connections associated with these sites and have instead begun to utilize content management tools that easily allow their teachers and staff to add and edit content to a web site. In addition to Manila , another tool that is being utilized for web page creation is Blogger .