|
Students never really see current events as unfolding stories. The cohort created a web site whose purpose was to track current events over a quarter or semester. The tracker enables the teacher and the students to take particular events and then see what happens with those events over the course of time.
|
|
"Students never really see current events as unfolding stories," Joe O'Brien, faculty leader for the Tracking Current Events cohort, said. "The purpose of the tracker is to enable the teacher and the students to be in a position to take particular events and then see what happens with those events over the course of time." This tracker, which was designed and created by the cohort, is a web site that helps teachers and students organize and study the evolution of any issue-be it social, cultural or political.
The web site, used in middle school and high school classrooms, is set up like a newspaper to engage students directly in following the events. The site is made up of three main components. The first piece is a survey that the teacher can construct to get the students interested in particular events. Students rate events the teacher chooses which ones they'd be most interested in tracking. The second part of the web site is an interactive page in which students research the chosen event online and then create links to research findings on the web site. Joe said, "That purpose really is to kind of create the background knowledge the student has to have in order to gain some kind of understanding of the event. The next step is to put them in a situation where they have enough knowledge to be able to take some kind of position on that event." This third component requires that students take a stance on the event through editorials. Students can respond to each other and debate the issue through responses to these editorials, in the form of "letters to the editor."
So far, the Tracker has been a success. "I think that the ease of use was one of the things that they liked, both for the teachers and the students," Joe said. "It's a type of web design where they really can take it on and make it their own and I think that was something very appealing to the teachers. In some ways it's not so much simply learning how to use the technology as it is learning how to think about these issues."
The Tracker is just one example of a way to incorporate technology into the classroom to supplement instruction and engage students. "The site is designed well enough that there is really not too much time that needs to be spent on [technical issues]," Joe said. "Teachers…began to see really nice ways to draw connections to what it is they typically would be teaching. One of the things we began to find is that as students were looking at this three, four, five different times over the course of a month, the events began to have a little bit more meaning which in turn seemed to capture their interest."
|
|
Contact Us