HELMERS . MAPS
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Once students are in the computer lab, it is important to counteract rootlessness, in other words, a kind of dazed perpetual-motion clicking that takes students farther and farther away from their purpose. I suggest designating or designing a page as "home," whether it is the teacher’s own page or a page created by someone else. I've used my own, specially-designed assignment pages that I require the students to bookmark at the start of the browsing session. An example comes from my writing course, Honors Composition, in which students were studying the social background of World War I in Britain. This brief page was designed to engage the students in visual and verbal study. They looked at paintings or contemporary photographs of battlefields and wrote short journal entries based on their work from the web.
Another option for teachers who are anxious to create a space for students on the web is to use the many WebQuests that are already accessible through the San Diego State University. WebQuests were developed by Bernie Dodge, who defines them as "‘inquiry-oriented’ activities in which some or all of the information that learners interact with comes from resources on the Internet." The advantage to using a WebQuest as a home page for students is that WebQuests are inquiry-based browsing assignments, especially designed by working elementary and upper-grade classroom teachers for other classroom teachers. Two examples are listed below:
Be a Web Site Sleuth by Jan Ferguson and Marge Wagner. This exercise in internet browsing is designed for grades one and two. The authors ask students to look for information about the authors of their favorite children's books. The students create a table with information about the sites that they visited, which include The Magic School Bus series and The Cat in the Hat.
The Realm of Fairy Tales by Judy Hoke. Ms. Hoke and her colleagues have created an extensive web of their own to teach the structure and style of fairy tales. The site is nicely designed with attractive graphics and easily manageable for students in grades four and five and above. Students use the site to analyze a fairy tale using a worksheet. Ultimately, they write their own fairy tale.
If these assignments look appealing, follow this link to find--and use--other Example WebQuests. These WebQuests are listed according to grade level and are tied to objectives for learning. Educators can access additional information--such as how to create their own WebQuest--at the WebQuest Home Page, titled "Creating Web-Based Lessons: WebQuests and other Internet Projects."
WebQuests require that the classroom atmosphere be structured and clearly guided. Dodge recommends a five-part structure to the design of a WebQuest: Introduction, Task, Process, Resources, Evaluation. An introduction orients the learner to the project and raises interest by being "relevant to the learner’s past experience [or] future goals." The Task area describes what the students should complete by the end of the exercise, such as writing a research essay or completing an informative Power Point Presentation. Effective WebQuests do more than just describe the task, however; they also "suggest the steps that learners should go through in completing the task," whether this is role playing or conducting a brainstorming session. Instructors can augment information gained from the web by comparison with resources found in books, videos, or audiotapes. For example, I have often assigned students a research portfolio that lists several types of print and electronic resources from which information must be gathered. Finally, like all assignments, the WebQuest must be evaluated. Unfortunately, Dodge admits that he is short of effective evaluatory measures, other than to, one, begin with a rubric that evaluates different aspects of the process and product and two, bring several teachers, parents, and peers into the evaluation process.
The importance of rooting students to a home on the web is to provide focus and normalcy in what can be a chaotic environment. In traditional usage, home is commonly understood as both a fixed entity bounded by an address and a plot on the map and an idea, a metaphor that describes daily experience. The philosopher of space Agnes Heller writes that it is essential to have a familiar base for travels:
[I]ntegral to the average everyday life is awareness of a fixed point in space, a firm position from which we ‘proceed’ . . . and to which we return in due course. This firm position is what we call ‘home’ . . . ‘Going home’ should mean returning to that firm position which we know, to which are accustomed . . . (Heller qtd. in Silverstone 26)
One of the other promising metaphors of the World Wide Web is that it provides us with a door to new worlds. We leave home in search of a vague elsewhere. Doors allow us to pass or constrain us from passing. The computer screen is a sort of "door" through which we glimpse something else, both mentally (as in gaining a glimpse of a new world of knowledge) and physically (optically, we do see the pages). In fact, the software that enables us to run Netscape or Explorer is called Windows. Thresholds sit between two worlds, home and away, familiar and unknown, and thus enable us to creatively think of teaching and learning as a journey (MacKenzie).
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Send mail to Marguerite Helmers, helmers@uwosh.edu