The
Internet is a tool.
1. Please begin your investigation of the uses of the Internet to Enhance Instruction by reading Tom March's article entitled "Working the Web for Education."
2. It's time to examine some of the most common ways to use the Internet to enhance instruction. As you start your journey through these sites, please be thinking about how you might use each instructional strategy to promote extended thinking skills, as well as both independent and cooperative learning skills, for your students.Return to Main PageLook at each of these Internet lesson ideas. Be an explorer! Enjoy the journey. Afterwards, you will be planning ways to have your students join the Wired World of Learning!!
A) Join an existing online project. There are literally thousands of such projects which engage students with investigations, with scientists, with students around the world. No need to reinvent the wheel, just take a look at what already is available: Online Projects
B) Create a hot list to point your students to the very best sites on the web for your chosen topic. This will save your students hours of wasted searching, and assure that they are reading high quality material. OR, you might ask your students to evaluate several sites on your hot list, with an eye to determining the quality/reliability for themselves: Hot Lists (Take a look at the IHS library page...your librarian will create a hot list for you...at any school is the district...what a deal!!!)
C) Have students create a scrapbook of important (or surprising, or intriguing, or controversial, or you-name-it) aspects of a given topic. This works particularly well when students already have a general understanding of a subject. This works well for cooperative groups, too, where each member of the group is concentrating on a different aspect of the topic. Students might download their "found" material into a newsletter, a cut-and-paste poster/paper, a slide presentation, etc. Scrapbook
D) Just the facts...a treasure hunt may be your choice. In this case, you have identified very specific information which you want your students to access. You provide links to exactly the right page (no advantage in their wasting time searching through multiple pages) and questions to guide their thinking. Treasure Hunt
E) Expand the thinking horizon with a subject sampler. In this activity, you select a very few (three?, four?) sites which are inherently engaging to students. Instead of just sampling, or looking for specific information, your students will examine the sites for the purpose of forming a point of view. Based on that they see/read/hear/do on the web sites, the students will be asked to respond, offer their own perspective, draw comparisons from their own experience, interpret, or the like. Subject Sampler
F) WebQuest is the last and most challenging web activity which we will look at today. The webquest begins with a probing question, a complex scenario, or an absorbing problem. The point of a webquest is not to FIND information, but rather to SYNTHESIZE and INTERPRET information on the way to formulating a thoughtful, meaningful response to the original problem. WebQuests may be presented as individual work, but most often they are cooperative activities for a group of students WebQuests
3. Your turn now!
A) BEGIN WITH THE END IN MIND! Start by identifying the Standards which your lesson will be supporting. Consider which unit of study you will be enriching with the Internet. Now it is time to decide which kind of Internet activity will best do the job for your students. For planning purposes, you can use your own planbook, your current lesson creator, or this simple planner.B) Now locate the resources on the web which you would like your students to use. If you already know of some excellent resources, good for you! If not, you can try looking at hot lists and directories which have already identified high quality sites.
C) Create a rubric for your students' use as well as for your use in assessing the students' progress. You will want to be sure that your rubric really reflects the standards and goals which YOU have identified. But feel free to look at the rubrics attached to existing web projects and borrow liberally.
D) Put the project together by creating a web page(s) or a handout to guide your students. Neither process is difficult...you've certainly done lots of handouts in the past. If you have the courage to try a web page, plenty of folks would be glad to help you. Begin, if you like, by calling (3111) or emailing the Office of Instructional Technology.