Making Informed decisions: Teachers' interacting with curriculum resources

It is quite common for teachers to supplement the curriculum with web learning resources. To design curricular sequences skillfully, teachers need to be sensitive to aspects of curricular coherence, such as sequencing that avoids gaps in the mathematical progression, consistent and balanced handling of mathematical objects as well as coherence with national curricula. Currently there is a lack of tools to support such notions of coherence, both in-design and in-use. One of the key aspects that educators need are means to communicate and describe pedagogical moves and pedagogic materials in an accessible, understandable way. We suggest a set of methodologies, based on a pair of technological tools, for studying the voice and balance of a collection of learning resources. The first is a tagging tool that can be used to associate didactic metadata with individual learning resources. The second tool is a “dashboard” for visualizing and navigating a tagged collection or textbook, representing didactic aspects of the curriculum. Our findings suggest that tools should offer ways to perform large scale studies to provide research finding that will be informative to the variety
of designers‘/practitioners communities.