Education Best Practices
Education Best Practices

From this page, you can access information on current educational practices, organized under the general headings of

Educational Policy and Administration
Teaching and Instructional Practices
unutki.org offers teachers the opportunity to create an electronic component for their classes. You can post assignments, communicate with parents, give your students access to class-related discussion boards and other materials, and more! The software is in its beta version, and you have the opportunity to use it with your classes, FOR FREE. Any updates made in the course of beta testing will automatically be included in your MyClass materials, and the FAQ sheet says that your membership is perpetual (unless you terminate it). No need for any special software or computer equipment; no need for knowledge of any special programming or HTML languages. All you have to do is work with text; the MyClass software does the rest.

ALSO: Check out our Information Quality page! It links to Web sites that can help you and your students learn how to evaluate what’s on the Internet.

Many of the resources that you will find on these pages have been produced by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) and the major OERI-funded institutions (Centers, Labs, ERIC) have produced a substantial body of educational research and development information. In the last few years, there has been a concerted effort to make this information accessible in useful forms beyond the academic research community.

Education Consumer Guides and Education Research Reports are two series of publications that were produced in the past within the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI). The sites are no longer being updated, but are still available for browsing. You may find links broken, but overall you may find the sites still useful. The OERI publications are brief, research-based explanations of current concepts and topics such as school-based management and cooperative learning.

Every year, the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) produces more than 200 ERIC Digests–two-page syntheses of the best, most current research on a topic. Topics covered are determined largely by the questions most frequently asked of the sixteen subject-oriented ERIC Clearinghouses. A full-text searchable collection of 2,001 ERIC Digests is maintained at the Department of Education.

The Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) contains selected educational resources, most of which are developed and/or maintained by AskERIC. The contents include:

ERIC’s Comparative Search Engine chart shows four ERIC databases, the types of documents contained in each one, possible search operators and fields, and information on the capabilities of each database’s search engine.
AskERIC Lesson Plan Collection contains more than 1,000 unique lesson plans which have been written and submitted to AskERIC by teachers from all over the United States.
AskERIC Web Site: AskERIC has redesigned its Web site. New features include a monthly electronic newsletter, a “simple search” interface, an archive to previously asked questions, and more. In response to questions received at AskERIC, their network information specialists have compiled over 3000 resources on a variety of educational issues. This collection includes Internet sites, educational organizations, and electronic discussion groups.
Education Listserv Archive includes archives from several education-related mailing lists. Individual list archives can be searched by date or by thread. The archives may also be searched using PLWeb information retrieval software. Within each mailing list’s archive are forms to search just that archive.
Gateway to Educational Materials (GEM): The Gateway is a consortium effort to provide educators with quick and easy access to the substantial, but uncataloged, collections of educational materials found on various federal, state, university, non-profit, and commercial Internet sites. GEM is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education and is a special project of the ERIC Clearinghouse on Information and Technology. The Gateway to Educational Materials, the ultimate online catalog of Internet-based lesson plans, curriculum units, and other educational materials, was recently expanded.
Resource Guides Online: These resource lists are provided as a complement to ERIC’s Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section. They include information on free relevant ERIC/CLL publications, publications from other sources, Web sites, organizations of interest, and conferences. The guides also offer useful searches of the ERIC database with information on ordering ERIC documents. The ERIC Clearinghouse on Languages and Linguistics recently added three new guides: Linguistics, Second Language Proficiency Assessment, and Dialects in Education.
Searchable Online Thesaurus of ERIC Descriptors: The ERIC Processing and Reference Facility has added a searchable version of the Thesaurus of ERIC Descriptors to the “Resources” section of its Web site. Search by keyword, category, or a combination of both, or browse the more than 10,000 descriptors in the Thesaurus. Bookmark the Thesaurus today!
(To our visitors: please note that these pages are being reviewed and added to on an ongoing basis. Please visit often, and use the Feedback form to contribute your comments and suggestions for this section of the OEA’s web!)

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