Documenting work of teachers and learners on the
WWW!
Hello everyone! For this week's
websites I want to return to highlighting one of the most
powerful potentials the World Wide Web provides for
educators -- a forum for documentation/publication.
Because the WWW is a multimedia forum, there are many
potentials for sharing both the planning, process, and
results of work. And as an international forum, the WWW
provides us with an authentic and diverse audience for
sharing, feedback, and collaboration within projects.
I'll start first with something I
worked on this summer with the National Writing Project's Rural Voices, Country
Schools Summer Institute. I
participated in this summer institute as a documenter. As
the teams of teachers from all over the country convened
in California to work on how to capture and document and
publicly share the work of rural schools over this three
year initiative, I had a digital camera, an Internet
linked computer, and institute participants signed up to
give me input for the website -- so we documented their
work and discussions around documentation of their
practice back at school. This was the first time we did
this kind of thing -- and besides being great fun, it was
very exciting in terms of learning how to document work
as it was happening, sharing the work (and play!) with
team members who couldn't physically come to to the
Institute, as well as creating a document to return to
for reflection and review over time.
The Franklin Institute Science
Museum here in Philadelphia are
doing a similar thing called "BioPoint." "BioPoint" will
follow the action in one suburban high school biology lab
at Cheltenham High School throughout the year. You can
catch up on what they are doing -- pictures, movies, text
are used to share the process of examining cells.
The Franklin Institute is part of the Science Learning Network. The SLN has been documenting the work of teachers and
students in their classrooms. For all local folks in the
Philadelphia School District, I'll highlight the Levering School in
particular, but there are schools all over the country
doing work with this network.
And I've mentioned these guys before,
but they are worth repeating...The Ralph Bunche school in
NYC has their (young!) students publish newsletters,
writings, and classroom projects on-line. Read about
their Shadow Project.
And just some *quick* notes on process
here. To do this you do need access to an Internet linked
computer, obviously, for publishing. Most districts/communities
now have these kind of computers, called servers, that
are on 24hrs a day and will 'serve' your publication to
the world. Next you or someone else (your students!,
local "webmaster", student interns, daughters/sons,
parents, etc) will have to learn to put together a web
document. There are many tutorials on-line to show you
how to create webpages. And you can buy software
that makes this process easier -- like Claris Homepage (about
$99).
Then, if you want to use photos, you
could buy digital cameras for about $300 or take your
photos to your local lab and get the images put on disk
for you. You can also use a scanner and scan into the
computer pictures of student work and/or photographs.
If people are interested in more
details about publishing in general you can either write me directly with questions or encourage me to
develop this in a future "Wednesday
Website" mailing. I also
have developed a "How to make a Homepage" page for the National Writing Project.
Or, if your not interested in
publishing, you can always just use email to communicate,
collaborate and ask questions of those who are. You might
find classrooms of students working on similar projects.
Or teachers convening to talk about issues of interest to
you and your colleagues. Just a few ideas. Let me know if
you have others.
Have a great week! Christina
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