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