The IAGC Teaching & Learning Center is a subscriber-supported resource for K-12 educators, students and families. The primary mission of the IAGC Teaching & Learning Center is to provide students, educators and families with quality resources, tools, information and support they can use (at home as well as in the classroom).
Included among our tools and services are an almanac, a calendar, teachable moments, a family guidance center, an academic competitions resource center, The Teacher Times, hotlists for over 100 different instructional topics, a resource request center, a student research center, three daily activities for student skill development and much, much more; all developed around a comprehensive collection of links to the finest public-domain content available on the Internet for K-12 education. Subscribers to the IAGC TLC are individual K-12 teachers and administrators, schools, school districts, university faculty, pre-service student teachers, home-school teachers, educational service agencies and other adults with interests in K-12 education.
The IAGC Teaching & Learning Center is not an on-line encyclopedia, nor should it be used as a primary resource for retrieving facts fast. The most effective uses of the IAGC TLC include:
- Professional development, especially for those teachers needing to bolster their own background knowledge. The IAGC TLC is a particularly effective tool for new teachers or teachers who find themselves in a new subject area or grade level. It is also an outstanding developmental tool for pre-service teachers in training.
- In-depth student research for those projects requiring a range of content from a variety of resources.
- Mulitcultural education, particularly thematic observations such as Hispanic Heritage Month, Black History Month and National Women's History Month.
- Academic Competition Preparation: Each year the IAGC TLC cross references the study guides from the major state and national academic competitions to the IAGC TLC content, providing extraordinary resources for student academic competition preparation.
The IAGC Teaching & Learning Center is an outstanding tool for the development of student research skills using the Internet, and because of its emphasis on the development of these skills, the IAGC TLC does not organize its content according to reading levels. In order to become effective researchers students need to develop the ability to self-select resources they can read and understand, and to cull from a more difficult resource that information which does make sense and is usable by them. To assist in the development of these skills, each day of the school year the IAGC TLC provides three student exercises (5-minute Quest, the Gnus for Kidz and Who Am I?) that teachers can use each day to help their students develop their research skills and basic knowledge.
The guiding principle of the IAGC TLC is One Serving Many. There is a vast amount of content on the Internet that is available for K-12 students and teachers. Some of it is good, but most of it is not so good. So that each individual educator does not have to continuously sift through the Internet to find the good stuff themselves, we at the IAGC TLC do the sifting for them, find the good stuff, organize it so that it can be used effectively, and share the results with our subscribers.
In addition to its expert organization, the IAGC Teaching Learning Center is robust with extensive cross-referencing between topics and guides, it contains no commercial advertising to distract teachers or their students from the task at hand, and it is developed around a single easy-to-use format shared by all IAGC TLC guides. The IAGC TLC uses only the highest quality content from only the most reliable sources, such as universities, K-12 schools, libraries, museums, businesses, corporations, government agencies and other institutions of acknowledged and trusted expertise. Each link has been reviewed for its content and has been selected because of its unique relevance to K-12 education. The IAGC TLC avoids links to sites maintained by individuals or hobbyists (except when they are of particularly high-merit), and the TLC avoids links to sites that are overtly commercial in nature.
Criteria for developing our links: The content to which we link must be from a source that:
- Is in the public domain.
- Has recognized credibility and reliability (e.g. museums, universities, libraries, etc.)
- Is appropriate and applicable to K-12 students and teachers.
- Is free of intrusive or objectionable content, pop-ups and advertising.
- Is stable and likely to be available in the future.
All links contained in the IAGC TLC are to content that has been inspected and assessed by a member of the IAGC TLC staff. Our links are monitored daily, and are in use by hundred of schools across the country on a daily basis. If a change is found to have occurred that may compromise the suitability of a link, that link is immediately re-evaluated and, if necessary, deleted.
Quick and effective access to content is the key to making the best use of the IAGC Teaching & Learning Center. To this end, the IAGC TLC offers several different entry points designed to address the specific needs of the user.
Among these are:
- The Internet Toolkit: A comprehensive starting point providing direct access to all IAGC TLC content, including an alphabetical index of guides; People, Places and Things; keyword search, and direct links to other entries and topics of special interest.
- The Student Research Center: A quick reference starting point with direct access to the alphabetical index of guides; People, Places and Things; keyword search; and the IAGC TLC Almanac.
- Growing Up: A library of weekly guidance newsletters to help parents and families better understand their children and how they, the family, can be more active and productive partners in the education of their children.
- The Academic Competition Resource Center: An entry point to guides for the current national and state academic competitions, each cross-referenced to IAGC TLC content. A tremendous time saver and the absolute best resource anywhere for an academic team preparing for competition.
- TLC Samples for New Users and Non Members: An annotated version of the Internet Toolkit with sample pages and explanatory text.
It is our goal to make the IAGC Teaching & Learning Center the most-comprehensive and affordable educational resource anywhere, on or off of the Internet. The IAGC TLC provides creative resources for quality education and is an essential tool for every teacher. It is also an extraordinary bargain for any school. IAGC TLC subscribers include hundreds of schools and thousands of teachers across the United States and beyond, and we consider it an honor and a privilege to serve each and every one.
