Planning a Reporting Activity
Multiple Choice
Attention: ONLINE RESPONDING IS DISABLED
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1.
We have looked at the reporting of information within the classroom. Specifically, we have examined the asynchronous, one-way report of information as a type of reporting that allows a person or a small group to create an information resource that will be useful to many others. Rather than merely transmitting facts to students who simply parrot back data, students today are expected to know how to gather, organize, and then transmit the information they have acquired. The idea is that as students learn, they are expected to teach others the new information that has been recently assimilated into their knowledge base. In other words, the process of reporting back to their peers gives students a chance to reflect, re-assimilate, and re-examine the information once again. This assimilation process helps cement knowledge, increases retention, and, with proper guidance from the facilitating educator, engages students in higher order thinking skills. One way that students may achieve this is through the creation of reports and stories based on their studies and learning.
For this exercise you are to create a plan for your students to create a technology-enhanced report of information activity. You are free to choose any of the various reporting technologies available (word processors, web pages, PowerPoint, multimedia, etc.) Your students may use any one of the four reporting styles, namely the persuasive, creative, narrative, or expository in their culminating activity. Since modern classrooms tend to be diverse, with some students from ESL backgrounds and various intellectual ability levels, make sure that you accommodate these students as you plan your lesson. Describe which of the skills listed in Bloom´s Taxonomy you wish for the students to operate from, and state which scaffolding activities you plan to use to help those students get there.
(Expected response is 300-400 words.)
example:
Collaborative Multimedia Stories
The Blue Valley Unified School District has experienced enormous growth over the last 20 years. From its start as a small, rural district serving farm families and agricultural workers, the district has grown into a high-tech, affluent suburb of the Kansas City area. This explosive growth, experienced in a relatively short time, has produced a cultural change within the schools. While many of the original families still remain, they are now outnumbered ten to one by families consisting of professional white collar and highly educated people.
This activity is designed for 10th grade students at Blue Valley West High School. The title of the project is ´Our Precious Heritage: Using Technology to Preserve Our Oral History.´ Students will use our fully equipped studio to transfer and organize clips into a presentation that will follow a ´Newscast/60 minutes´ format. Students will view the HBO special ´An Oral History,´ which interviews people who were born before the year 1901. The teacher will begin with a ´brainstorming´ discussion of open-ended interview topics related to particular themes and then represent subtopics through the use of a web drawn on the board. Webbing can be used to encourage students to consider what they know about each subtopic and/or what they want to know.
Students will then work in groups of five to develop their own open-ended questions that will be used in the interviewing of a few of the elder members of the original founding families in Blue Valley. Students will write questions designed to elicit interesting/amusing anecdotes that document the early history of the area, with a particular emphasis on tradition/way of life in earlier days. After students have designed these questions, they will then contact the senior center looking for interested interviewees with a long history in Blue Valley. Students will record several hours of raw footage documenting the oral histories of these seniors that are evoked by their open-ended questions.
The students will then bring their raw footage back to the studio, where they will organize clips from the interviews and will write a script that highlights and emphasizes the traditional, small town beginnings of Blue Valley. Students will organize their information in the form of a story frame, a graphic organizer of major events and ideas from the interviews to help guide students´ thinking and heighten their awareness of the outline/idea level structure. The teacher can model this process by filling out a chart on an overhead, or students can complete a chart individually or in groups after an interview is finished. The final, edited product will be broadcast to the parents over our Blue Valley Today Network on Cable television, and will be preserved in our archives as a cultural artifact documenting the rural origins of our district.
The assignment breakdown will be that one student will serve as editor/manager of the questions, one will serve as the interviewer, one will serve as cameraman, one will serve as project/multimedia editor, and one will be the spokesperson for the final video presentation. Although the project managers have their own responsibilities the final points will be divided among the participants voluntarily by merit.
Scaffolding in lesson:
Text Representation
in the form of a Story Frame/Map: A graphic organizer of major events and ideas from an interview to help guide students´ thinking and heighten their awareness of the outline/idea level structure. The teacher can model this process by filling out a chart on an overhead, or students can complete a chart individually or in groups after an interview is finished.
Bridging:
Brainstorm/web-A graphic organizer used to involve students in thinking about and planning what they will study, learn, read about, or write about within a larger topic. A teacher may begin with a ´brainstorming´ discussion of topics related to a particular theme and then represent subtopics through the use of a web drawn on the board. Webbing can be used to encourage students to consider what they know about each subtopic and/or what they want to know.
Modeling:
Modeling clarifies procedures through direct experience, and provides concrete examples of what a student´s finished product should look like. The teacher can model the story frame/map process by filling out a chart on an overhead, or students can complete a chart individually or in groups after an interview is finished.
Bloom´s Taxonomic Skills in Lesson:
Application:
the third level of ability, is represented when students use methods, theories, or concepts in new situations. In this lesson, students will create entirely new, open-ended questions to be used in their interviews.
Analysis:
This requires the student to examine and break information down into parts to examine and understand its meaning. This level requires students to ´read between the lines,´ make inferences, and find evidence to support generalizations. This is a more advanced level, since it mandates that the student be able to see the big picture, distinguishing between facts and inferences while evaluating the relevancy of data. Having a student construct a structural outline of ´clips´ from the interview process would be another example of analysis.
Synthesis:
This level deals with the task of putting together parts to form a new whole. This might involve working with parts and putting them together in a creative new way, or using old ideas to come up with new ones. The idea here is that the student takes information from several areas and combines it in such a way as to create a new structure. Words which point to the task of synthesis are integrate, design, invent, modify, formulate, and compose. Examining the interviews, and putting the various clips together to create a new program is an example from this lesson plan of synthesis.
Technology Enriched Learning
