The Virtual Tour A Web-Based Teaching Strategy. (how-to guide) Lawrence Tomei; Margaret Balmert.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2001 International Society for Technology in Education

Virtual tours introduce learners to an academic content area by presenting a series of multisensory, multimedia instructions for exploring material.

Perhaps for the first time since the computer made its debut, the teacher is in the position to command the technology-based instructional resources used in the classroom Gone are the days when teachers must rely solely on the expertise of computer professionals to create computer-assisted instruction. With the advent of the Web, creating student-centered, age-appropriate material rests in the hands of the classroom teacher. In their quest of technology self-reliance, teachers can turn to the virtual tour for the newest link to literally millions of content-specific sites that supply images, sounds and video media.

Defining the Virtual Tour

A virtual tour is a Web-based teaching tool that presents multisensory, multimedia instruction appropriate for individual student exploration as well as group learning experiences. Virtual tours offer the learner a host of front doors. A front door is a Web page constructed by the classroom teacher that introduces academic content appearing on sites throughout the Internet; it follows a specific format and contains certain elements of lesson design that support individual student learning. Each of the 14 teacher-developed doors attempts to match an instructor's preferred teaching strategy to a student's ideal learning style. Additionally, the virtual tour offers the concept of amplified sites from which to draw additional, up-to-date content. An amplified site is a Web page or pages containing academic content and linked on a front door; the teacher decides whether the site contains the answer to one or multiple lesson objectives or enough material to address the entire lesson. Plenty of material on nearly every appropriate subject area can be found on the Web. The tricks is using just the portion of a Web site that addresses the particular lesson objective in the precise format best suited to your students. Together, front doors and amplified sites solve this problem.

From the Teacher's Perspective

Few strategies provide teachers with such rich opportunities for expanding the walls of their classroom. The virtual tour enhances curriculum with authentic learning experiences in the form of exhibits, simulations, games, portfolios, paths, galleries, guided tours, and linked itineraries. Both cooperative and discovery lessons are improved by focusing the virtual tour on instructional units immersed in interpersonal communication, community awareness, and technology objectives.

Preparing a Virtual Tour

Technology-based instruction is best prepared with the aid of an instructional systems design (ISD) model, and the ADDIE Model is an excellent choice for creating a virtual tour. By following the five-step process, teachers Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, and Evaluate a technology-rich unit of instruction employing all the strengths of the Web.

The ADDIE model is based on ISD concepts developed by Robert Gagne, Leslie Briggs, Robert Morgan, and Robert Branson. The ISD process provides the means for determining the who, what, when, where, why, and how of instruction. The concept of a systems approach is based on a generalized view of teaching. It is characterized by an orderly process for gathering and analyzing student performance requirements and the ability to respond to identified learning needs. The application of a systems approach ensures that the curriculum and the required support materials (in our case, the technology) are continually renewed in an effective and efficient manner to match the variety of needs in a rapidly changing environment. The ADDIE model's purpose is to:

* provide a systematic approach to designing lesson content,

* identify the instructional goal and its context before identifying a solution,

* provide a method of looking at instruction from the whole rather than its parts,

* assist with better planning to make effective use of new media and technology, and

* incorporate the latest teaching and learning theories into the curriculum.

Additional information is available in Conditions of Learning (Gagne, 1985) or by visiting Bob Hoffman and Donn Ritchie's Web site at San Diego State University (www.webcom.com/ journal/hoffman.html).

To aid reader understanding, we prepared a prototype virtual tour to use as an example. The tour was based on an actual lesson presented to sixth-grade students during the 1999-2000 school year on the topic of dinosaurs. Its design followed the steps in the ADDLE model.

1. Analysis. The initial stage of any instructional development effort determines the appropriate goals, objectives, and content for the lesson. When preparing a virtual tour, teachers must first select a topic best taught using the Web-based format. Some topics lend themselves to technology; others do not, and no quantity of images, sounds, or video clips will make them successful. Once the content focus is determined, the psychology for teaching the topic (behavioral, cognitive, or humanistic) must be decided.

Behaviorally, the virtual tour is a natural extension of sequential learning with content presented from first to last, simple to complex, general to specific. The cognitive teacher offers content in progressive steps until a schema, or pattern, emerges to aid the learner in the construction of new knowledge. Humanism offers a personalized approach to learning, selecting information important to the student although, for younger students, they may not be particularly aware of what is or will be important to them.

The virtual tour makes the perfect integrated thematic unit by combining several academic disciplines. As a result, the analysis phase can be the most time-consuming step in lesson preparation. In their backward design model, Wiggins and McTighe (1998) suggest that learning goals must be the first decision when creating the new lesson. Table 1 displays the learning goals for the dinosaur lesson on the left and the specific activity that is being targeted on the right.

Table 1. Learning goals and activities for the dinosaur lesson.

Learning Goals           Learning Activities(*)
 
Navigate the Internet.   Use the mouse to point and click on
                         hyperlinks identified by the teacher and
                         containing content-specific information.
 
Locate specific Web      Enter a specific Uniform Resource
sites.                   Locator (URL) in the location window of
                         Navigator.
 
Download images and      Use the right mouse button to click on
text.                    an image, view that image to ensure it
                         is desired, then save that image onto a
                         personal copy or storage media. Use the
                         left mouse button to click and drag to
                         select, copy, and paste that text into a
                         word processing document.
 
Print images and pages   Use Navigator to print an entire Web
                         page, selected portion of a Web page,
                         and specific images on a page.
 
Prepare a 3-5-minute     Use the rubric for classroom
presentation.            presentations to present the dinosaur
                         lesson to your classmates.
 
Prepare a personal Web   Add, File, and Edit Bookmarks in
address book.            Navigator and print a copy of your
                         bookmarks to share with other students.

Resource

Navigator is available for download at www.netscape.com.

(*) These directions are for a PC; make needed adjustments for a Macintosh.

2. Design. Lesson design begins by considering the target learner. Piaget (1970) identifies a characteristic of learning called "operations" and distinguishes between the concrete and abstract learner, bringing to light the importance of making instructional material age-appropriate for the learner. Concrete learners (approximately 7 to 11 years old) demand tangible experiences (e.g., images, sounds, and video clips) supported by the virtual tour and the Web-based media on which the tour is grounded. The abstract learner (ages 11 years and older) revels in concepts and ideas (e.g., graphics and hyperlinks) that support multisensory exploration.

Once the age and learning styles of the prospective students have been established, specific learning objectives can be formulated. For this task, many teachers prefer the format attributed to Mager (1962). Its simplicity of design makes the behavioral learning objective a natural for this instructional format. Mager suggests three components for a properly constructed objective:

* Condition provides the instruments for the learning situation.

* Behavior is both observable and measurable. Activities surround the lesson and present evidence that learning has occurred.

* Criteria specifically details how well the behavior must be performed to satisfactorily accomplish the lesson goals.

The behavioral learning objectives for the dinosaur virtual tour are shown in Table 2.

Table 2. Behavioral learning objectives for the dinosaur lesson.

Objective I

Using a personal computer and Web address list, students will navigate the Internet locating two specific dinosaur Web sites and locate, download, and print at least two images of their favorite dinosaurs.

Objective II

After locating a given Web site, students will review the information and answer the questions in the workbook: "What is the difference between an omnivore and a carnivore? When did the dinosaurs live? What were the most common dinosaurs in North America?"

Objective III

Given a Web address, students will click on a dinosaur name to go to a simple black-and-white print-out and color, cut out, and mount their favorite dinosaur for instructional use. Students will be expected to provide a 3-5-minute presentation on their chosen dinosaur.

3. Development. With the analysis and design firmly in mind, the next step is the advancement of the lesson material. For the virtual tour, that means the selection of a front door. There are actually 14 front doors (Figure 1) that offer a facade for the tour and its many amplified sites. Each is strong in a particular operation, either concrete or abstract. Each is also tagged with a psychology for learning: behavioral, cognitive, or humanistic. And, because we are dealing with technology, each front door has also been labeled easy, challenging, or difficult with respect to the intricacy of the tools required to effectively place the tour online.

[Figure 1 ]

4. Implementation. Selecting a front door commensurate with your lesson objectives and personal technical skills is not difficult. With 14 available, the selection is based first and foremost on your analysis of the lesson goals, followed by the learning styles of the student, and then finally by the technical expertise of the designer. For this article, we have selected the six "easy" front doors to explore in detail: Next Exhibit, Topical Path, Event Sequence, Chronology Text, Gallery, and Itinerary.

Next Exhibit. One of the most readily mastered formats for the virtual tour opens with an introductory screen explaining the purpose of the lesson and some simple directions. Textual material is held to a minimum; images control movement throughout the lesson. The learner travels sequentially forward to the next exhibit, returns to the previous exhibit, or ends the tour at any point by returning to the front door. The evaluation tag "ABE" indicates that the Next Exhibit is Abstract, Behavioral, and Easy. This means that it is most appropriate for teaching abstract content to create a lasting image in the learner's mind; it is behavioral in focus, presenting information from first to last; and it is technically easy to create in both concept and application. Figure 2 depicts the dinosaurs virtual tour using the Next Exhibit format.

[Figure 2 ]

Topical Path (Figure 3). Also appropriate for abstract content, this focuses on the delivery of content material appropriate for discovery learning objectives. Learners are provided an opportunity to use their prior knowledge (a precept of the cognitive approach) by selecting teacher-identified amplified sites containing additional instructional materials.

[Figure 3 ]

Event Sequence. A lesson on dinosaurs might comprise many mini-lessons; one for each of the scientific periods of evolution. The Event Sequence front door focuses on a unique era of evolving change or perhaps movement during a designated time period. Highly abstract, this door is principally humanistic in its presentation and relies primarily on text-based links to its amplified sites. Figure 4 demonstrates how the dinosaur lesson would look in the Event Sequence format.

[Figure 4 ]

Chronology Text (Figure 5). This front door uses the time line approach to create text-based links to new information. Each time increment is expressed in days, weeks, years, decades, or centuries and is a link to more detailed material, oftentimes created by the teacher. Remaining consistent with the demands of the concrete learner, images augment the instruction with multisensory features. Chronology is a natural learning style for the behavioral lesson as it follows the time increments to present the information. And, again, dinosaurs are a likely topic for this front door format.

[Figure 5 ]

Gallery: One of the most popular front door formats, the Gallery promotes cognitive learning using images organized to follow the specific learning objectives of the lesson. Amplified sites augment the instruction, and sidebars (links provided on the left or right of the screen) offer navigation beyond the lesson should students wish to view additional materials. The Gallery's reliance on graphics promotes concrete learning and fosters the building block approach that cognitive learners relish. The dinosaur lesson shown in Figure 6 uses the Gallery front door to present material.

[Figure 6 ]

Itinerary. The final easy front door is patterned after a person's daily diary. It presents learning as a series of related activities, appointments, and personal memories. Most Itinerary virtual tours simulate the activities of a subject during a "typical" 24-hour period, while others chronicle events over a much longer period of time. Take the dinosaur lesson, for example. Figure 7 tours the daily life of a dinosaur from the perspective of "Rex."

[Figure 7 ]

One of the many advantages of the virtual tour is the flexibility that Web-based lessons offer the teacher. Though other forms of educational technology demand considerable computer storage resources, a tour is usually hosted on a single floppy disk. Most of the resources of the virtual tour are external sites. Only the front door itself, along with any internal sites and related images, needs to be captured to a local storage medium. Students can take the single floppy to any Internet-ready computer in the school lab, classroom, or even at home and immediately connect to the materials that the teacher has prescreened for content and applicability. Or the technology coordinator can upload the disk information to the school's Web server for universal access and better teacher control. Regardless, the virtual tour is becoming a popular venue for the presentation of Web-based material. But until now, no one has identified the various front door formats and their pedagogical importance.

5. Evaluation. Educators often overlook the final stage of the ADDIE Model, particularly when technology is used. Table 3 offers a final look at each of the six easy front doors examined in this article and offers a few words regarding their evaluative strengths and weaknesses.

Table 3. Evaluating the front door lesson.
 
                  Rating
Front Door        (1-10)   Comments
 
Next Exhibit        2      Assessment almost nonexistent;
                           requires external review using
                           objective tests such as
                           matching, true-false, or
                           completion.
 
Topical Path        2      Similar to the Next Exhibit,
                           this front door requires
                           external assessment using class
                           discussion or essay tests.
 
Event Sequence      4      Most effective evaluation for
                           this front door includes
                           authentic assessments such as
                           portfolios and thinking
                           journals.
 
Chronology Text     5      Use a hard-copy, text-based
                           quiz with this front door to
                           assess your students'
                           understanding of the material.
 
Gallery             6      With so many user choices for
                           this format, students are best
                           assessed using typical
                           discovery learning techniques
                           such as group work reports,
                           and presentations.
 
Itinerary           5      Subjective evaluations are most
                           appropriate here. Assess your
                           students' knowledge with
                           reports.

Conclusion

Keep in mind that there are eight additional front doors available for presenting abstract and concrete ideas; behavioral, coghitive, and humanistic content; and technically challenging or difficult construction. If you would like to visit representative sites of these remaining formats, see Table 4 for URLs of some good sites discovered so far.

Table 4. The remaining front doors and representative Internet sites.

Front      Evaluation
Door       Tag          Site Name         URL
 
Guided     ABC          U.S.              www.whitehouse.gov/
Tour                    White House       WH/glimpse/tour/html/
                                          index.html
 
Table      ACC          Dragonfly         http://tess.uis.edu/
                        Museum            www/environmentaled/
 
Map/       ACD          Gordon's          www.pgordon.com/
Globe                   Ongoing
                        Journey
 
Room       AHD          Museum of         www.imss.fi.it/
Exhibit                 the History       museo/4/
                        of Science
 
Timeline   CBD          Olympic           http://
Map                     Games:            devlab.dartmouth.edu/
                        Victors           olympic/Victors/
 
Picture    CCC          Wonders of        http://ce.eng.usf.
Button                  the Ancient       edu/pharos/wonders/
                        World
 
Button     CCD          Oswego City       http://oswego.org/
Advance                 School District   staff/cchamber/web/
                                          default.htm
 
Vehicle    CHD          The U-505         www.msichicago.org/
                        Submarine Tour    exhibit/U505/
                                          U505tour.html

Using the virtual tour format and these front doors, teachers can design their own online resources for the classroom. They no longer must rely on the computer professional to create technology-based instruction. The virtual tour is the answer to locating, organizing, and incorporating millions of content-specific sites into student-oriented online lessons.

References

Gagne, R. M. (1985). Conditions of learning and theory of instruction (4th ed.). New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Mager, R. F. (1962). Preparing instructional objectives. Palo Alto, CA: Fearon Publishers.

Piaget, J. (1970). Science of education and the psychology of the child. New York: Viking Press.

Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (1998). Understanding by design. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Dr. Lawrence A. Tomei (tomei@duq.edu) is an assistant professor of teaching and technology. His responsibilities include developing and teaching workshops, seminars, and in-service programs for practicing teachers. His expertise includes educational psychology, teaching and learning strategies, and technology use in the classroom. He earned his EdD from the University of Southern California. Reach Dr. Tomei at Duquesne University, 209C Canevin Hall, Pittsburgh, PA 15282; 412.396.4039; fax 412.396.5388.

Maggie Balmert (balmert@ duq.edu) is a full-time academic advisor for Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Maggie is currently completing a master's degree in instructional technology there. She holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Indiana University of Pennsylvania and is a former high school teacher for the Greensburg Salem School District in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. Reach Maggie at A. J. Palumbo School of Business Administration, Duquesne University, 600 Forbes Ave., Pittsburgh, PA 15282; 412.396.5702; fax 412.396.5304.