Is there a silver bullet teaching practice that will so appeal to tech-reluctant teachers that they finally become seriously interested in using technology with their students? As the former director of Instructional Technology for the New York City public school system, such an approach was a long sought Holy Grail. Lamentably, one that remained undiscovered.

When I moved on to teaching graduate education courses at several prominent universities, this quest continued. One day, I reached out to a colleague to help me prepare a keynote speech and I had that all important “ah ha” insight. I was researching a speech to give at an International Reading Association conference about easy technology adoption for literacy educators when Dr. Rose Reissman, a veteran literacy educator, staff developer and curriculum writer opened my eyes to a body of tech-centered, literacy practices, all of which involved teaching with author Web sites.

Author Web sites are a free and easy to use resource found throughout the Web. They are rapidly becoming a must have for authors whose works of young peoples’ literature have become a mainstay in today’s classrooms. These Web sites represent a trove of highly motivating instructional resources waiting to be discovered by teachers.

Dr. Reissman has used author Web sites in classrooms throughout the New York City area. She’s had success with the approach teaching students and mentoring their teachers in elementary, middle and high school grades, in both public and private schools, and with both mainstream and bilingual classes.

“Any approach that can help make avid, adept readers of the students I worked with in the third grade at PS 7 in the Bronx, capture the attention of seventh graders at Ditmas Middle School in Brooklyn, and still entice my juniors at St. Jean the Baptiste High School in Manhattan, helping them to grow as readers even more, is the kind of thing we literacy educators have been looking for, for a long time,” she likes to point out.

Eventually, Rose and I got around to writing a book on this powerful practice, one that I see as a key approach in transforming our traditional schools to 21st-century digital learning environments. It’s titled straightforwardly “Teaching with Author Websites” and is being released this fall.

I’m so keen on this approach, which uses technology to take tried and true, traditional instructional practices into the new territory that our digital native students crave, that I’ve produced a free, 20-minute professional development podcast about it. The podcast will introduce teachers to the use of author Web sites. It identifies authors, practices and easy technology use for teachers with an emphasis on how this new approach can easily be integrated with traditional curriculum already in use.

Listen to the podcast.

Learn more information about my upcoming book “Teaching with Author Websites.”

—Mark Gura has been an educator for more than decades. The former director of Instructional Technology of the New York City Department of Education, he began his career as a teacher, spending 18 years in elementary and middle school classrooms in Harlem. More recently, he has taught graduate education courses at Fordham and Touro universities. Gura was a staff and curriculum developer for NYC’s central Division of Curriculum and Instruction before being recruited to develop and administer the first citywide instructional technology program. He has written extensively on education for The NY Daily News, Converge and a variety of other education magazines, and has written and published five books on education. He is the co-producer/co-host of the popular The Teachers Podcast and Talking Financial Literacy Podcast. Mark Gura lives and works in the New York City area.