There are several resources that can help you find information on the Internet. Many of these resources exist to help educators specifically locate materials for their classroom or curriculum. In addition, often these educational materials meet specific standards and benchmarks. While there are national resources that attempt to help teachers locate materials linked to any state's standards, Michigan has exemplary resources for locating Michigan Curriculum Framework (MCF) linked materials. Take some time to explore one of these resources.

Michigan Teacher Network

Michigan Teacher Network (MTN), winner of several Web site awards including the Awesome Library Editor's Choice, is a project developed at Merit Network, Inc. Aimed at teachers, administrators, library media specialists, technology coordinators, counselors, and parents, MTN helps members of the education community locate materials in a variety of curriculum and professional development areas. Michigan Teacher Network not only provides lesson plans and curriculum resources, it also has practical links for Michigan educators. This includes links to email lists, professional organizations, education periodicals, and job postings. In addition, Michigan Teacher Network provides original content like Success Stories that highlight schools using technology in exemplary ways, Best Practice information, and a digital archive of the Michigan Association for Media in Education (MAME) publication, Media Spectrum.

Full Record Display

Michigan Teacher Network offers users a full record display of information about each educational site. This is a great time saver as the sites linked to MTN have already been reviewed by media content specialists. The site evaluation has already been done. Clicking on Full resource description provides users with valuable information about a site, including:

• a brief description of the site
• author
• browsing categories
• appropriate grade level(s)
• resource types (curriculum units/projects, handout based activities, etc.)
• correlation to Michigan Curriculum Framework Benchmarks where appropriate
• hyperlinked keywords for quick searching
• and more

Searching in Michigan Teacher Network

Michigan Teacher Network offers users multiple ways to quickly locate relevant educational resources. You will find a keyword search box on every page in the MTN site. Using a keyword search is fast and usually retrieves many results. To narrow your search or to search for specific titles or authors of sites, click on the Advanced Search button found in the top navigation bar on every MTN page. Additional search options include searching by title, author, resource type and keyword, and advanced curriculum search. All of these options make finding resources in MTN much more efficient.

Michigan Curriculum Framework in MTN

Educators can easily locate and browse Michigan Curriculum Framework (MCF) standards and benchmarks within Michigan Teacher Network. You can find the link to the benchmarks and resources correlated to them by clicking on the MI Standards button located in the top navigation bar of every MTN page. This section of MTN includes the Michigan standards and benchmarks with correlated resources for the following subject categories: Arts Education, Career and Employability Skills, English Language Arts, Mathematics, Science, Social Studies, and Technology. The entire standard section of MTN is searchable.