3.27.2009

Module #4: To Boldly Go Where..., Well, You Get the Picture

WebQuests

Escaping the dusky textbook


So far, we've looked at online educational resources and the nature of "educational social software." Blogs and wikis are by far the most common ESSs used by teachers today. Another genre predates the ubiquitous Web 2.0, the WebQuest. It dates way back to the 1990s, a time when Kathy Schrock owned the educational Internet. What is a WebQuest? Here's a definition:
A WebQuest is an inquiry-oriented activity, where some or all of the material a student interacts with comes from the resources on the Internet. WebQuests eliminate the need for a student to search, sometimes endlessly for information on a topic, since prescreened links are provided in the WebQuest. Another benefit to using WebQuests is that they are easily created and support any curriculum topic. They are motivating and highly interactive, allowing students to use real life resources that are up to date.
WNET has an excellent online workshop about WebQuests. You might even be able to get professional credits for viewing it. Bernie Dodge's WebQuest About WebQuests is another good example, showing how to design roles for each of the students.

Educators need to view the WebQuest in two ways: how to design and evaluate it, the other is what each step of a WebQuest will look like to a student. Let's look at the final product first.

Instead of writing traditional text with links to click on, WebQuests are decidedly nonlinear, and take a constructivist approach to learning. Usually, the quest is divided in the following sections:
Students typically complete WebQuests in cooperative groups. Each student in each group has a specific research role. Let's look at one of mine, and see how they work.

Creating online inquiry

Framing student exploration


So we're back at the main issue of this colloquium: how to create educational writings that aren't like dusty books, that are more than static lists of information. Creating a storyline line for students to move back and forth through, allows students to learn at their own pace, a hallmark of differentiated instruction. Students searching out what they are specifically interested in, while keeping the focus and objectives of the online research intact is the goal of any successful WebQuest.

Building a WebQuest is easier than you may think. It's important to gather all the materials you want to include in the online lesson before you organize it into the above steps. Here are some additional resources to help you craft your WebQuest:

Evaluation

Homework #3

Let's recap what we've done, or should have done, by now:
  • Each group searched ERIC for relevant education articles (and APA citations) that relate to their lesson plan.
  • Each group uploaded their content area, relevant standards, Aim, ERIC summaries/citations to their wiki page.
  • Each group found 3-6 Internet lesson plans/Websites similar to their own lesson plan, and uploaded their results and summaries to their wiki page.
  • Each group completed the Blog WebQuest and uploaded their answers to their wiki page.
  • Each student posted a comment to this blog, identifying 3 kinds of ESS software listed in the "7 Things You Should Know About..." resource, and describing how you might implement them in your classroom.
  • Each group has created a lesson plan, using the Lesson Plan Template.
  • Each group has created several Regents based assessment questions to use during the Summary part of the lesson.
And now for today's homework.

Deliverable #1: Each group will use the materials they have gathered so far to develop a WebQuest. To do so, please follow the below steps:

  1. Search for Web-based content that applies to your lesson plan (please use more than Google).

  2. Organize the Introduction, Task, Process, Evaluation, Conclusion, and Teacher Page from your Internet materials, using one of the following templates if it helps.

  3. Use an online resource to generate your WebQuest. The best free one is filamentality, another one is Quests 2 Teach. If you prefer to save your WebQuest to disk, you can use aclearn.net, seneca, or teach-nology.

  4. As an alternative to #3, I am using Quest Garden to design my WebQuests. If your group would like to use my password to access the website, let me know, and we'll work something out.

That's It!
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3.13.2009

Module #3: Classroom Assessments

Finishing Up: How can we know students learned the lesson?

Here is what each group should have completed so far:

  • 150 word summary of your research for your lesson plan, including
    1. NYS Standards – Make sure to include Key Ideas and Performance Indicators
      (Note: use the National or other State Standards if there are no New York State Standards)
    2. How the research informed your lesson plan
    3. How you plan to implement what you learned from your research into your lesson plan
    4. 4 APA Citations

  • Six Website links that have lesson plans similar to one you created, and descriptions that will be added to our link list.

  • Complete the Online Collaborative Writing Project, which will help your group define the words, "blog," and "wiki."
    1. Common Blog Features
    2. Blog Characteristics Sheet
    3. Blogger Planning Sheet
    4. Process Rubric Sheet

  • Adding content to the Wikispace webpage, including
    1. 150 word summary
    2. Lesson Plan Websites
    3. Lesson Plan Websites
    4. Definitions of Blogs and Wikis

Lesson Plan Templates

Avoiding the rush to insanity


There are wikis , online generators, Excel spreadsheets, and webpage lists on lesson plan templates. We will use my simple Lesson Plan Template to help build your lesson plans. All you need to do is type or copy/paste your information into the template, and save it. That's it!

Writing Regents Questions

How do we know our students know
what we know we taught them?


The best way to find Regents questions appropriate to your lesson plan is to go online to the Regents archive and find the appropriate subject matter.
Let's say we wanted to create some Science Regents questions for Grade 4. First, we would find a recent exam, and access the Rating Guide for that exam. Go to the next to last page of the document (page 17), and look at the item map that links each question in the test to relevant standards. Let's say my lesson applied to Standard PS 5.1. Question 9 is appropriate for that standard. So let's download the Spring 2007 Grade 4 Science Regents Exam and create a question that we can save as a Word document.

Looking at Question 9, we can see that we need to create a question format, a graphic format, and an answer format. Open up the final document to see what we will be making.

Homework

Each group will create 5 Regents based questions that apply the New York standards appropriate to that lesson, using the techniques modeled in class.
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3.06.2009

Module #2: Collaborative Writing

What is the 21st Century Research Paper?


Deconstructing text

Writing the Body Electric


So you've done your research in a traditional sense, searching and finding several educational articles on the ERIC database about your Aim, APAed them for future reference, summarized them for later use. But that's only the first step, now we face the more perplexing question: How should lesson plans be written for digital natives?

How can we write a lesson that will connect with students with "continuous partial attention"? In the era of Twittering, IMing, and Facebook, writing a letter to a friend, or even an classrom essay with a pen and paper seem strangely archaic. Traditional production of meanings, teacher-assign/student-write/teacher-evaluate are evolving into more fluid, permeable scriptings.

Implementing current technologies into the classroom is an excellent way to experiment with developing successful lessons. Educause's Learning Initiative's 7 Things You Should Know About... offers a wonderful resource to keep current with the ever evolving educational/technological landscape. The "Horizon Report" is another annual resource that describes current trends in educational technologies.

All of these new Internet based applications are categorized as "social software." In an educational setting, these technologies are redefining what "text" means. Our understanding of the act of writing has been altered -- instead of an author, friends post to bulletin boards, learning from each other, developing cumulative understandings of a body of knowledge. Open source, "collaborationware," or educational social software, ("ESS"), sometimes called "c-learning,"can create student-centered approachs to learning. Implementing technology in the classroom, therefore, requires finding ways for students to use ESS as a tool for learning.

But let's look at the most common expressions of ESS: the blog and the wiki.

"We Have Liftoff..."



Look up and see the new atmospheric layer: the blogosphere. The Weblog, or "blog," like the education blog you're reading right now, allows instructors a low-cost publishing alternative, as well as an immediate connection with his or her students. Students can write responses to classroom questions quite quickly in a virtual extension of the classroom. It's easy for professors to find the responses (no stack of papers hiding the desk) and evaluate students almost contemporaneously with their writing activities.

So Welcome to the Blogosphere!

There are so many blogs out there that there are now websites that simply compile other educational blog websites. Awards have been given for the best ones.

So Blog On!

Writing Wikis


A common use of the electronic bulletin board is to compile massive lists of everything. Although helpful, you can never be too sure that these kinds of Web pages aren't collecting digital dust with broken links. A deeper use of social software develops collaborative writing projects. Wikis allow students to easily create and edit their own writings, and create links to other web pages.

Many educators use pbwiki and edublog to host their web pages. To learn more about blogs and wikis, several online resources and seminars are available to help educators get comfortable using wikis. Their most important function is to share information about a specific topic, like lesson plans, by anyone who is willing to upload their work, to anyone who is interested in downloading the information. For example, here are several lesson plan wikis:
These wikis could easily be simply called websites as well, but the most important quality of wikis, again, is that many people contribute and edit the online content. Of course, the best wikis are the ones we write ourselves. My classes, collectively, have been building what, in my opinion, is the best lesson plan reference page on the entire Internet. All of you will be contributing to it as well. So let's get on with it.

Evaluation

Homework #2


Deliverable #1: Each group will upload their Homework #1 research to their group's wiki page.

Deliverable #2: Each group will find either 3 lesson plan Websites that offer multiple lesson plans in the groups content area and are not already on the lesson plan wiki, or 6 Internet lesson plans that directly relate to the group's Aim. Combinations of the two options are permitted. An Internet lesson plan on fractions is not appropriate to an Aim about factoring. Each lesson plan reference will include a hyperlink, and a few sentences describing why this is a good lesson plan for your Aim. Please use the bulleted web sites above as a starting point to finding your lesson plan web sites.

Deliverable #3: Each group will access the Blog WebQuest to fill out the remainder of questions on their group's wiki page. Students only have to :
  1. Reference/read the 'content material' resources to collectively come up with definitions of "blog" and "wiki."
  2. Determine a way their lesson plan can use a blog or wiki during instructional delivery of the lesson.
Deliverable #4: Each student will post a comment to this blog, answering the following question:
  • Referring to the "7 Things You Should Know About..." resource, identify 3 kinds of ESS software listed in the resource, and describe how you might implement them in your classroom.
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