A Little Behind in Your Technical Climb?

Here’s How to Help Teachers Get More from the ‘Net

Gary West, Director of Computing Services

Greenwood School District 50

 

Introduction

Although you drive your car to work every day – and you have done so for years – you may not know how to use that car to get to the Moon or to cure athletes’ foot for the Carolina Panthers football team.

 

Similarly, computer assisted instruction – CAI – does not help you integrate technology into your curriculum.  Your reading lab, with thirty computers and students scheduled once a week, does nothing to integrate technology into teaching or learning.  In fact, the computer in your library where students use the card catalog to find books does more for your students’ technology learning than going to the CAI lab every day.

 

Please don’t misunderstand.  CAI labs may have very important roles in learning; however, your technology can do so much more for your students.  Technology, when integrated into your curriculum, can enhance content learning in ways that CAI labs can’t touch – by putting the content into a context that makes sense.  

 

The keys are teaching and networking.  Teaching should, even must, cause learning.  Networking provides a connection to resources that support teaching and learning – resources that are available on the Web.  

 

Although the Web is relatively new, there are already some “traditional” ways of using it in classrooms.  Many of those traditional approaches are not very different from our regular traditional approaches.  The following sections explore some of the ways – traditional and not-so-traditional – your technology can be used to its fullest potential.  And to your students’ fullest potentials.

 

Traditional Web Resources

Teachers traditionally use the Web for two things:  (1) to find lesson plans and (2) to find content-specific sites. 

 

There are thousands of lesson plans on the Web – for all subjects and grade levels (for an extensive index, go to http://www.gwd50.k12.sc.us/LessonLinks.htm).  There are sites like EduHound (http://www.eduhound.com) that specialize in organizing lesson plans for teachers.  In addition, there are sites like Education World (http://www.education-world.com) that reference resources to be used with lesson plans.  PE Central (http://pe.central.vt.edu) offers lesson plans for a specific content area. 

 

Teachers can find abundant sites for specific content areas.  Sites like Views of the Solar System (http://www.solarviews.com) deal with a narrowly defined topic.  African Voices (http://www.mnh.si.edu/africanvoices/), from the National Museum of Natural History, provides a comprehensive view of a specific topic.  The Grammar Lady (http://www.grammarlady.com) takes an original approach to the topic of writing.  There are even sites like Teaching with Technology (http://www.teachertidbytes.com) that help with using technology in the classroom.

 

Teachers and students can find general reference sites to help with learning activities.  The South Carolina State Library has licensed a set of resources, umbrella’d under the DISCUS name (http://www.gwd50.k12.sc.us/Discus.htm), that teachers and students can access from school or home.  Other resources, like Encyclopedia Britannica (http://www.britannica.com) provide access to traditional information in traditional formats.  There are even lesson sites for students, such as Homework Central (http://www.homeworkcentral.com/vsl_index.htp), where students can get help with their assignments in all content areas.

 

New Ways to Use the Web

Although rich in resources, sites like those listed above are often used to support traditional approaches to teaching and learning.  Those sites don’t cause the implementation of traditional approaches; they simply provide good resources for those who want to maintain those approaches.

 

Technology offers the opportunity to change our approaches, however.  Not only because it brings new resources to our classrooms and homes, but because it changes the way we can manage our information.  We no longer need to know everything – we just need to know where to find it and to have the resources to get to it.  We no longer have to take valuable classroom time to teach things to which our students already have access.  We can now teach strategies for accessing information rather than memorizing it.  That gives us time to teach our students how to analyze what they find and help them learn to apply it to specific problems.

 

If we take that approach, we can turn the Web into a resource that takes students beyond the normal – the traditional – boundaries of learning.

 

There are some Web sites that offer obvious resources for this approach.  GovSpot (http://www.govspot.com), for example, offers virtually (no pun intended) everything there is to know about our government, including its history and the services it provides.  NewsDirectory (http://www.newsdirectory.com/news/press) provides a link to every online newspaper in the world – you can select by continent, country, state, or city.  Discovery Channel School (http://school.discovery.com) and other sites like that provide links to science and social studies resources of all types.  Sites like these can bring new and timely resources into any learning activity.

 

When lessons are designed to address specific standards and objectives, sites like those are obvious choices to bring information to students and to help them analyze and apply that information in specific contexts.  Yet, there are thousands of other sites that can be incorporated into learning activities in motivating and productive ways.  Many of those sites may have a specific purpose for being on the Web – however, those sites may provide other resources not directly related to that purpose but which can be valuable in learning activities.

 

Although designed to provide information to the avid sports enthusiast, CNNSI’s baseball statistics site (http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/baseball/mlb/ml/stats/index.html) provides excellent resources to teach and learn fractions, percents, and ratios within a context familiar to many students.  AfriCam (http://www.africam.com) is famous for its Web cameras at a dozen or more African water holes, where you can watch the wildlife come to drink – and eat, occasionally.  It also provides resources that can be used in social studies, life science, earth science, and geography.

 

Newseum (http://www.newseum.org) can be used to teach world and U.S. history, as well as the role of science in the development of our societies, through the use of print, audio, and video news.  These resources can add context to otherwise isolated events from the traditional views of history.  The same can be said for Teaching with Historic Places (http://www.cr.nps.gov/nr/twhp/), a site that lists properties on the National Historic Register and includes the historical context in which the properties became famous.  The Department of Veterans Affairs maintains a page entitled America’s Wars (http://www.va.gov/pressrel/AmWars99.htm), which lists casualties, as well as the name and date of death (if appropriate) of the last surviving veteran of each.  Indirectly, it offers resources for mathematics, civics, geography, and history.

 

Sometimes, the best learning can take place in times of extreme interest in current events.  For example, hurricane season may create a lot of interest in the weather.  Hurricane-related Web sites (http://www.gwd50.k12.sc.us/Hurrican.htm) can provide material for mathematics, geography, earth science, physical science, U.S. history (a lot of history is made and caused by hurricanes), and writing – not to mention weather.  Similarly, tornado season (http://www.gwd50.k12.sc.us/Tornado.htm) can provide abundant resources. 

 

Volcano Watch (http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/data/volcano.html) updates the status of the top ten active volcanoes in the world.  It provides the chance to learn longitude and latitude, earth science, mathematics (especially graphing data), and other topics.

 

Sites like How Stuff Works (http://www.howstuffworks.com), Cool Fact of the Day (http://features.learningkingdom.com/fact/today/), and This Day in History (http://www.historychannel.com/thisday/) provide motivation to learn as well as resources that can be used in almost every class setting.  They provide archives, also, so you can look up past features, facts, and dates, respectively.  All three provide excellent places to start lessons that will put perspective on the activities.

 

For elementary classrooms, Sound Safari (http://www.wildsanctuary.com/safari.html) provides opportunities to learn geography, environmental science, earth science, animal science, and communication – while listening to the sounds of endangered animals around the world.  For middle schools, a site like Houdini (http://www.uelectric.com/houdini/contents.html) can teach a little history along with the magic.  The site has an extensive collection of Houdini’s own writings about his experiences all over the world.

 

Sites like those described above, along with changes in our teaching strategies, can motivate students to learn in all content areas because the learning takes place in a context that makes sense.  For example, a site about building the dams under the TVA project during The Great Depression can help math students understand why it’s important to be able to calculate the flow of water coming in one pipe and going out another without overflowing the holding tank.  The context can make it make sense.

 

Conclusion

Your technology, used to its fullest, can take your students to the Moon and help them find the cure for Panther foot itch – all in the same day.  Many Web sites can help students master standards that are not obviously part of the content at those sites.  When you encourage your teachers to go beyond the purpose of a Web site – to find a context for lessons – they can add meaning to learning. 

 

When your teachers incorporate such resources into their learning activities, students are not only more motivated, they learn to access, analyze, and apply information in new and interesting ways.  Your students will develop technological and logical skills that cross content boundaries.

 

The Web is full of stuff worth learning about.  It’s also full of stuff that can be used to teach other stuff.  And that’s where context meets content to create learning.  Everything else just clicks.

 

 

**Gary West is Director of Computing Services for Greenwood School District 50.  The title of the article comes from “Flesh and Bone,” a tune by Jimmy Buffett.

 

This article was published in The Palmetto Administrator, the journal of the South Carolina Association of School Administrators; Fall 2000.