Thursday, August 14, 2008

4/11/08

Avoiding Obsolescence: How to Keep a Good Lesson Drift into the Archives...

RSS Feeds

Managing Multiple Media Flows

Over the years there have been lesson plans I have created that I have fallen in love with, so much that every year I teach them without any variation. As you might expect, every year the lesson gets a little more stale, until finally a lesson that I used to teach with passion is little more than something to give to a substitute teacher when I can't be in the classroom. Everyone in this class has created a wonderful unit plan, but if you don't retool it every now and again, adding new material, removing parts that didn't quite work, you'll end up handing out worksheets to your class, reading the newspaper while your students are filling them out.

We often don't have the time to stay current with the many educational journals that are published every week or month. But if we don't read up, our lessons won't continue to evolve into more effective, engaging instruction. Before the days of computers, "clipping services," used to summarize news and journal articles, so that you could quickly scan a list of articles to see if there was anything of interest to you.

Today, there is a "killer app" called RSS News Feed that allows you to see when websites have added new content. You can get the latest headlines and video in one place, as soon as it's published, without having to visit the websites you have taken the feed from. The easiest way to set up your own personal news reader is to subscribe to a Web based service. The following websites are the most commonly used:

You can also download an add-on for Mozilla Firefox.

Let's look at an example of an RSS compiler. My Bloglines webpage is where I track over a dozen online educational publications. You can click on the 'EDU 33692' link in the left window to view all of the headlines from all of the publications, or click on any of the listed publications to just view that specific publication's recent articles. Whenever I have a few minutes, I can quickly scroll through the headlines of all of these publications to see if there is anything of interest to me. Instead of subscribing to each of the publications and getting swamped with email, or clicking on scores of links, I can have each website feed me their digital news clipping, all on one list that I can quick scan through for articles of interest.

Anyone can create their own RSS feed webpage by subscribing to one of the services described above, and then simply clicking on the orange 'RSS' button most online journals provided on their homepage. Here are some lists of the most commonly subscribed to RSS feeds:

And here are some directories:

Mashing Feeds

Filtering Multiple RSS Feeds

Even with RSS feed listing, you can quickly end up with hundreds of titles to scan. Hence the next leap in online content gathering: the mashup, sometimes called the Web 2.0 remix. The mashup is expected to be one of the technologies most likely to reshape educational pedagogies in 2008. Instead of viewing multiple RSS feeds in a linear fashion, line by line, a mashup can search for specific keywords of interest, and filter down all of the articles to only those that have the keywords of interest. An example of a mashup can be found on the Washington Post's website.

There are several online providers of mashups, I use the Yahoo Pipe service. Let's look at one of my mashups. I'm constantly on the look for Chemistry Teaching positions, so I've created RSS feeds to craigslist.com, insidehighered.com, and monster.com. I then created a filter that would only post entries that included the term, "chemistry," in it. Hence, in one page I can view multiple job posting for chemistry teaching positions. It's all good!

A more complicated mashup is my educational social software pipe. I listed about 20 RSS feeds to various educational online publications, and filtered hundreds of articles using the keywords, "blog," "wiki," e-learning," "digital natives," web 2.0," and "WebQuest." Currently, 12 items are posted, all relevant to my interest in technology in the classroom – what this class is all about.

Respectfully submitted,

Robert Lewis

Adjunct Professor
Boricua College

4/4/08

Finishing Up: How can we know students learned the lesson?

Here is what each group should have completed so far:

Each student has read the three introductory articles, and write a wiki entry that describes one thing discussed in each article that you would like to implement in your classroom.
150 word summary of your research for your lesson plan, including

NYS Standards
How the research informed your lesson plan
How you plan to implement your lesson plan
4 APA Citations

Six Website links that have lesson plans similar to one you created, and descriptions that will be added to our link list.
Complete the Online Collaborative Writing Project, which will help your group define the words, "blog," and "wiki."

Common Blog Features
Blog Characteristics Sheet
Blogger Planning Sheet
Process Rubric Sheet

Completing the worksheets from the WebQuest About WebQuest site.
Adding content to the Wikispace webpage, including

150 word summary
Lesson Plan
Lesson Plan Websites
Materials for WebQuest
Lesson Plan Websites

Lesson Plan Templates

Avoiding the rush to insanity

There are wikis , online generators, Excel spreadsheets, and webpage lists on lesson plan templates. We will use my simple Lesson Plan Template to help build your lesson plans. All you need to do is type or copy/paste your information into the template, and save it. That's it!

Writing Regents Questions

How do we know our students know
what we know we taught them?

The best way to find Regents questions appropriate to your lesson plan is to go online to the Regents archive and find the appropriate subject matter.

Let's say we wanted to create some Science Regents questions for Grade 4. First, we would find a recent exam, and access the Rating Guide for that exam. Go to the next to last page of the document (page 17), and look at the item map that links each question in the test to relevant standards. Let's say my lesson applied to Standard PS 5.1. Question 9 is appropriate for that standard. So let's download the Spring 2007 Grade 4 Science Regents Exam and create a question that we can save as a Word document.

Looking at Question 9, we can see that we need to create a question format, a graphic format, and an answer format. Open up the final document to see what we will be making.

Homework

Each group will create 5 Regents based questions that apply the New York standards appropriate to that lesson, using the techniques modeled in class.

3/28/08

How can we design lessons that stimulate student inquiry?

WebQuests

Escaping the dusty textbook

What is a WebQuest? Here's a definition:

A WebQuest is an inquiry-oriented activity, where some or all of the material a student interacts with comes from the resources on the Internet. WebQuests eliminate the need for a student to search, sometimes endlessly for information on a topic, since prescreened links are provided in the WebQuest. Another benefit to using WebQuests is that they are easily created and support any curriculum topic. They are motivating and highly interactive, allowing students to use real life resources that are up to date.

WNET has an excellent online workshop about WebQuests. You might even be able to get professional credits for viewing it.

There are two ways to look at a WebQuest: the first is how you as the teacher are going to design and evaluate it, the other is what each step of a WebQuest will look like to a student. Let's look at the final product first.

Instead of writing more linear text with links to click on, WebQuests take a constructivist approach to learning. As Bernie Dodge, one of the original creators of the WebQuest once stated, "[a WebQuest] is an inquiry-oriented activity in which some or all of the information that learners interact with comes from resources on the Internet." Usually, the quest is divided in the following sections:

Students typically complete WebQuests in cooperative groups. Each student in each group then has a "role," or specific area to research. WebQuests often require cooperative group work, where each person researches a specific area, or has a specific task. Let's jump back into one, and see how they work.

Bernie Dodge's WebQuest About WebQuests

Each of you will take on a role, and evaluate a handful of WebQuests. Once everyone on the group has evaluated each WebQuest, based upon their persona, your group will collectively evaluate each WebQuest.

Creating online inquiry

Framing student exploration

So we're back at one of the main issues of this colloquium: how to create educational writings that aren't like dusty books, that are more than static lists of information. Creating a storyline line for students to move back and forth through, allows students to move along at their own pace, searching out what they are specifically interested in, while keeping the focus and objectives of the online research intact.

Of course, if you're creating a WebQuest (hint, hint) you're more likely to gather all the materials you want to include in the online lesson before you organize it into the above steps. Here are some additional resources to help you craft your WebQuest:

Evaluation

Homework #3

Let's recap what we've done, or should have done, by now:

Each student searched for and summarized three articles about how the classroom will look different than it is today.
Each group developed a lesson plan that includes NYS and NYC standards, an Aim, development of the lesson, and a summary.
Each group used ERIC to find four education articles (and APA citations) that relate to their lesson plan.
Each group uploaded their information to their wiki page.
Each group found 3-6 Internet lesson plans similar to their own.
Each group completed the Blog WebQuest and uploaded their answers to their wiki page.

And now for today's homework.

Deliverable #1: Each group will use the materials they have gathered so far to develop a WebQuest. To do so, please follow the below steps:

Organize the Introduction, Task, Process, Evaluation, Conclusion, and Teacher Page from your materials.
Use an online resource to generate your WebQuest. The best one is filamentality, another one is blogs2teach . If you prefer to save your WebQuest to disk, you can use aclearn.net or seneca.

That's It!

3/14/08

One of my first breakthroughs with wiki writing was in a computer I was teaching, a typical set of students, some had MySpace pages, some weren't sure how to turn on the computer. So when the class started, and hearing the expected question, "how do I get on the Internet?" I was intimately aware of the dilemma. I could fell my frustration pressure points quickly kicking in -- my grand plan for the next two hours on manipulating white space was in grave jeopardy. I wanted to use examples on my blog to illustrate various layouts, to answer questions on an online worksheet. Half the class was answering the questions the other half staring at the screen, giving up before the lesson even started.

I designed the blog so that students could walk into class, get online, and do the warmup exercise with very little supervision. My vision for my computer classes is for students to access my blog, follow instruction on the most recent entry, do an activity that will stimulate students to think about the topic for the class, leading into me modeling the lesson, resolved by the last part of the blog entry -- the homework assignment, requiring each student to upload their work to their personal wiki page. And in the beginning of the next class, while everybody is working on the warmup, I'm clicking through the wiki pages, assessing everybody's work.

But as is often the case in computer classes, a quarter of the students don't know how to open FireFox. And my anxiety immediately rose, triggered by past failures, where I'm running around the room, madly trying to convey how to cut and paste to students in the farthest corners, meanwhile, the students I am wedging myself around are waiting for further instructions, Googling the most recent Nike kicks mpegs.

Teaching computer skills in a heterogeous classroom is the most common environment in many academic institutions -- most degree programs only require one computer class. Teaching "all-in-on" computer courses, as you might imagine, is often an exhausting task -- trying to bring everyone to the same skill level is a daunting task. And I've done it enough to be acutely conscious of when the dilemia is eternally recurring again.

http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=423&action=article

Second Life Educational Resources

NCTI

The Edublogger

2/4/08 -- Module #2: Blogging and Wiki Writing

What is the 21st Century Research Paper?

Collaborative Writing

Blogging the Body Electric

So you've done your research, found several educational articles about your Aim, APAed them for future reference. How should I write up the lesson plan for digital natives? In the era of twittering, IMing, and dodgeball, is there any place for pen and paper? Once again, we need to reevaluate our writing techniques to ensure that our students are fully engaged in our instructional objectives.

There is a new layer of atmosphere in the 21st century: the blogosphere. Like air molecules engaged in Brownian motion, students freely share their ideas in a virtual extension of the classroom. Open source, "collaborationware," or "educational social software," (ESS), can create a student-centered approach to learning. The result, our understanding of the act of writing has been altered -- instead of an author, "mashed up" data. Even academic professors are producing their own blogs, so many that there are now websites that simply compile other educational blog websites. Although ESS origins date back to the 1940s, community learning, or "c-learning," is all the rage, and since 2006, awards have been given for the best ones. Here's a list of some edublogs.

Like any technology, blogs are misused and misunderstood. So you should use some online resources to help you clearly define your objectives if you decide to use a blog in your classroom. They are mainly used as a public diary, addressing causes and concerns someone may have. "Call and answer" techniques can be useful, where the teacher posts a question or activity on a blog, and student post comments with their own answers and ideas. Because the comments are publicly viewable, students often take more ownership of their responses, compared to writing an answer on a slip of paper, to be stacked up on a pile of papers, that only the teacher will read.

You are reading an education blog right now, the same one we used last week. How am I using my blog? Mainly as an online resource, and homework assignment poster for this class. I have many unpublished drafts, few online posts, and over time, I delete old ones after incorporating the best of their content into new postings. The reason I minimize postings is that the less computer-savvy students often "scroll into oblivion," and can't find the specific posting I'm referencing in class. This deletion technique weakens the organic evolution of blog writing, but makes it easier for "digital immigrants" to read.

Some of my other classes have different objectives, so my blog writing techniques vary from class to class. Blogging, in my opinion, will always be fundamentally teacher, or writer, centered. Our next style of writing, wiki writing, is much more collaborative.

Writing Wikis

The overarching theme to these modules is to avoid coding another static web page that is never updated and collects digital dust. Instead, we should challenge ourselves to develop collaborative editing and writing projects. One of the most common web applications teachers can use to develop student centered content is the wiki. A wiki is computer software that allows users to easily create, edit and link web pages. Wikis are often used to create collaborative writing projects, which make them excellent educational resources. Education Week recently published an article about wikis, citing several examples currently maintained by teachers. Look at two of the two wikis mentioned, and observe some of the similar and different qualities between them.

Michael Horton's scienceinquirer is mostly list-based -- many good science teacher resources
Jennifer Dorman uses her wiki, Dorman-Data-Digest, as a gateway into her website, blog and podcast, as well as a cornucopia of resources for various American history units, but no interactive writing either.

Many educators use pbwiki to host their wiki pages, mainly because educators can use the site for free. Just a couple of weeks ago, a seminar (for credits?) was held on the site. Getting a feel for wikis yet? Their most important function is to share information about a specific topic, like lesson plans, by anyone who is willing to upload their work, to anyone who is interested in downloading the information. For example, here are several lesson plan wikis:

These wikis could easily be simply called websites as well, but the most important quality of wikis, again, is that many people contribute and edit the online content. Of course, the best wikis are the ones we write ourselves. My classes, collectively, have been building what, in my opinion, is the best lesson plan reference page on the entire Internet. All of you will be contributing to it as well. So let's get on it.

Evaluation

Homework #2

Deliverable #1: Each group will upload their Homework #1 research to their group's wiki page.

Deliverable #2: Each group will find either 3 lesson plan Webpages that are not already on the lesson plan wiki, 6 lesson plans already referenced on the lesson plan wiki, or some combination thereof. The Webpages must be directly related to your lesson plan Aim, so a Internet lesson plan on fractions is not appropriate to an Aim about factoring. Each lesson plan reference will include a hyperlink, and a few sentences describing why this is a good lesson plan for your Aim.

Deliverable #3: Each group will access the Blog WebQuest to fill out the remainder of questions on their group's wiki page. Students will make the following revisions to the WebQuest:

Include the links above in this posting to help you with definitions of "blog" and "wiki."
Each student will include two summaries of the articles found for last week's homework.

1/30/08

How can we teach with technology?

Preface:

Diverting students from the virtual gingerbread house

Today's youth are often more skilled with computers than their mentors. In their world, "everybody has MySpace." As "digital natives," children are easily enticed into gingerbread homepages, aglaze with hypertext, rife with meaningless content. Yet the virtual world offers many opportunities to enhance learning. Online information allows students to read and write their own questions, organize events with other students, living a Second Life, even using avatars to define their own identity. Many educators, born before the net generation, often experienced classrooms as a grid of students sitting in rows and columns, reading the next chapter out of a book written by educational authorities. Hence the dilemia: designing lessons in the future will be radically different than the lessons our teachers created, requiring new teachers to integrate current technologies into the classroom, like email, if we want pique our students' curiosities.

Too often, students are left to their own plugins in the digital classroom. Many teachers prefer to apply research techniques they used when they were students: walking up a library's marble steps, drifting down dusty bookshelves, the "shushers" behind the desk not so hip as they are today. Some educators, as "digital immigrants," can offer little more guidance than how to log on, or print out a page, adrift in a digital sea of online research. As a result, the "online educational resource" rapidly devolves into a multimedia device satisfying the saccharine, flickering attentions of an adept tweenster: a .mp3 player, a sneakers catalog, an IM chatterbox. We all know the result, schools fine students for cell phone use in class, place "filters" on network access, which digital natives easily circumvent, leading to more and more draconian lock-down procedures, like shutting down access to sites like YouTube and mySpace, or even banning computers altogether from the classroom.

Even if educators are relegated from the "sage on the stage," to the "guide on the side," we cannot abandon our fundamental imperative: framing inquiry in the digital classroom. The Internet is a "technological enframing of being." Without an overarching, organizing pedagogy, students will be tempted to do what you're probably thinking about right now: check your email while I'm delivering today's lesson, chat on AIM, shop on eBay. How can we divert students from virtual gingerbread houses? We can either wave our hands in frustration, moan that learning is dead, accept more and more command-and-control procedures limiting students' Internet access, or, create our own "educational toolbars," that allow us to connect with students, helping to ensure students don't turn down the paths of misinformation, mind-numbing waste, and obscenity so common on the Internet.

Overview:

Upgrading our educational toolbars

Our goal will be to produce online educational materials. More importantly, we, as teachers and students, will collectively experience a pedagogical process that moves beyond the "textbook brick." The topics we will cover, in no particular order, are as follows:

Educational Research

Database Queries
(ERIC, EBSCO, Gale, SIRS, CAIRSS)
Standards Alignment
(USA, NYS, NYC)

Document Production

Regents Based Item Writing
(Word, Acrobat)
Online Collaborative Writing
(Blogs, Wikis)

Student Centered Inquiry

WebQuests

These topics will be applied across curriculum. Groups of 2-3 students will choose a subject area (Language Arts, Social Studies, Math, Science, Art, Physical Ed.) as well as an Aim for a lesson in that area. As we explore the above topics, each group will apply what they learn to developing a Unit Plan organized around their chosen Aim. Each group's final product will be memorialized on our class wiki, freely accessible for any teacher with Internet access. This process will help us all experience writing as an organic, evolutionary process: easily uploaded and downloaded, constantly upgraded, hopefully valuable to other educators.

Let's first excavate some of the archaeological foundations of the World Wide Web, before it became the "Internet." The earliest, easiest versions of Internet content are the "recipe pages," or the "point-and-click" resource guides. Let's look at some examples of this primitive application of educational online resources.

Virtual hieroglyphics:

The rise of the hotlink

So here's an example of bundling the canons of New York education standards. Specifically, the following standards will be useful to elementary teachers:

New York City standards are based on the above State standards. These NYC resources may also be helpful.

Additionally, national education standards are becoming more and more important. Here are a couple of the more famous ones:

The above lists are examples of the most familiar "online educational resources" -- links to other webpages of interest, usually unchanging, very similar to a stack of books in a library. To be sure, the list resource can be very helpful, but once one is created, revisions are rarely made to them, indeed, dead links are often common blights on the "recipe page". More importantly, once a "net gen" clicks through all of the links, their eyes will soon be elsewhere, little learning actualized. Instead of "click and die," where the reader is little more than a passive reader, we should build on the remains of these foundations, making hypertext less linear, more pleasurable. *

Evolving away from the recipe page

Innovate – focuses on the creative use of information technology (IT) to enhance educational processes in academic, commercial, and governmental settings.
Edutopia – The George Lucas Educational Foundation (GLEF) was founded in 1991 as a nonprofit operating foundation to celebrate and encourage innovation in schools.
EducationWeek – Originally launched as the "Moonshooter" project in 1957, the journal is recognized as “American education’s newspaper of record.” Its primary mission is to help raise the level of awareness and understanding among professionals and the public of important issues in American education.
Education Review – publishes reviews of recent books in education, covering the entire range of education scholarship and practice.
eLearn Magazine – published by the Association for Computing Machinery, a not-for-profit educational association serving those who work, teach, and learn in the various computing-related fields. Founded in 1947, ACM's stated mission is to advance the arts, sciences, and applications of information technology, with a special emphasis on teachers, managers, and administrators working to develop educational programs or classes on the Web.
EduCause Quarterly – EDUCAUSE Quarterly (formerly CAUSE/EFFECT) is a practitioner's journal about managing and using information resources in higher education. EDUCAUSE Quarterly includes articles (written by professionals in the field and peer-reviewed) that relate to planning, developing, managing, using, and evaluating information resources in higher education. Information resources encompass technology, services, and information.

Research Databases

Boricua students also have access to the following databases, at school and at home. You will need passwords to login at home.

I'm still working on making all of the links perfect, but the descriptions for each database will help you choose the ones that will best help you do specific research.

General

MasterFile Select — full text coverage for more than 700 periodicals covering general reference, business, health, education, general science, multicultural issues, as well as abstracts for more than 2,050 titles. This database also features 35 full text reference and travel books.
TOPICSearch — explores social, political and economic issues, scientific discoveries and other popular topics discussed in today’s classrooms. Contains full text for over 139,800 articles from 4,800 diverse sources including international and regional newspapers.
Academic Search Elite — Academic Search Elite provides full text for more than 2,000 journals in nearly every area of academic study including: computer sciences, engineering, physics, chemistry, language and linguistics, arts & literature, medical sciences, ethnic studies and more.
Newspaper Source — Newspaper Source provides cover-to-cover full text for 28 national (U.S.) & international newspapers. The database also contains selected full text for more than 260 regional (U.S.) newspapers. In addition, full text television & radio news transcripts are provided from ABC News, CBS News, CNN, CNN International, FOX News, NPR, etc.
Serials Directory— The Serials Directory provides access to the most up-to-date and accurate bibliographic information as well as current pricing structures for popular serials. It contains nearly 212,000 U.S. and international titles, including newspapers; data from nearly 108,235 publishers worldwide.

Science

Science Reference Center — contains full text for nearly 640 science encyclopedias, reference books, periodicals, etc. Topics covered include: biology, chemistry, earth & space science, environmental science, health & medicine, history of science, life science, physics, science & society, science as inquiry, scientists, technology and wildlife.
General Science Collection — full text coverage for more than 60 of the most popular science publications including Archaeology, Astronomy, Discover, National Geographic, National Wildlife, Popular Science, Science News, Scientific American, and many others.
Funk and Wagnalls New World Encyclopedia — indexes over 25,000 records, covering an array of topics. Full text for each record may be easily accessed by double clicking on the topic from the display. The database contains various images, offers brief biographies as well as information in a variety of subject areas.
EBSCO Encyclopedia of Animals — in-depth information on a variety of topics relating to animals. The database consists of indexing, abstracts, and full text records describing the nature and habitat of familiar animals.

Medical

MEDLINE — authoritative medical information on medicine,nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system, pre-clinical sciences from over 4,800 current biomedical journals.
Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition — provides nearly 550 scholarly full text journals focusing on many medical disciplines. Also featured are abstracts and indexing for nearly 850 journals. Coverage of nursing and allied health is particularly strong. In addition, this database includes Lexi-PAL Drug Guide, which covers 1,300 generic drug patient education sheets with more than 4,700 brand names.

Business

Business Source Elite — Business Source Elite provides full text coverage for nearly 1,100 business publications and economics journals, including nearly 500 peer-reviewed publications. In addition to the full text, this database offers indexing and abstracts for more than 1,750 journals. Business Source Elite contains full text from the world's top management and marketing journals. This database includes full text (PDF) coverage dating back as far as 1985, and detailed company profiles for the world's 10,000 largest companies.
Regional Business News — incorporates 75 business journals, newspapers and newswires.
Military & Government Collection — current news pertaining to all branches of the military, this database offers a thorough collection of periodicals, academic journals and other content pertinent to the increasing needs of those sites. The Military & Government Collection provides cover-to-cover full text for nearly 300 journals and periodicals. The database also offers indexing and abstracts for nearly 400 titles.

Education

ERIC — provides access to education literature and resources. The database provides access to information from journals included in the Current Index of Journals in Education Resources in Education Index. The database contains more than 1,194,000 records and links to more than 100,000 full-text documents and
Professional Development Collection — highly specialized collection of nearly 520 high quality education journals, including nearly 350 peer-reviewed titles. This database also contains more than 200 educational reports. This is the most comprehensive and most valuable collection of full text education journals in the world. In addition to full text, indexing and abstracts are provided for more than 700 journals.

Gale Databases

Custom Newspapers – Search a collection of more than 900 newspapers, both national and international.
New York State Newspapers – 28 major newspapers published in the state of New York, including the New York Times and the New York Post.
Health Reference Center Academic – Multi-source database provides access to the full text of nursing and allied health journals, plus the wide variety of personal health information sources in InfoTrac's award-winning Health Reference Center.
Informe – Una colección de revistas hispánicas con textos completos. Abarca negocios, salud, tecnología, cultura, temas de actualidad y otras materias.
Gale Virtual Reference Library – database of encyclopedias and specialized reference sources for multidisciplinary research.
Business and Company ASAP – Providing researchers with information on companies, markets and industries. From market trends, mergers and acquisitions to current management theory and company overviews. Access business and trade journals, newspapers and company directory profiles with full text and images.
Business and Company Resource Center – Business and Company Resource Center is a fully integrated resource bringing together company profiles, brand information, rankings, investment reports, company histories, chronologies and periodicals.
Junior Edition K12 – Now with over 330 titles, cross searchable with E-Books, this periodical database is designed for students in junior high and middle school with access to a variety of indexed and full-text magazines, newspapers and reference books for information on current events, the arts, science, popular culture, health, people, government, history, sports and more.
Twayne's Author Series – Comprises 600 full-text titles from the Twayne Literary Masters series, 200 each from Twayne World, US, and English Authors.
National Newspaper Index – National Newspaper Index provides quick access to the indexing of America's top five newspapers in one seamless search: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post.
Health and Wellness Resource Center and Alternative Health Module – Provides instant access to carefully compiled and trusted medical reference materials. Includes nearly 400 health/medical journals, hundreds of pamphlets, over 700 health-related videos from partner Healthology, Inc., and articles from 2,200 general interest publications in addition to a broad collection of Gale reference titles.

SIRS offers several comprehensive resources, including:

Researcher — features thousands of full-text articles and analysis on today’s hottest and most controversial social, scientific, health, historic, economic, political, and global issues.
Government Reporter — contains fulltext US government documents, and graphics. Included are Supreme Court decisions, historic documents, National Archives, and more.
Renaissance — provides dynamic information on the arts and humanities. Fulltext articles and color images are selected from more than 1,200 publications.
WebSelect — online databases of quality websites on vital issues and topics, evaluated daily for relevance and credibility.
Interactive Citizenship — helps student learn about every facet of government, economics, and concepts underlying world affairs. In-depth chapter essays, related articles, primary sources, and websites provide both background context and the latest information on key concepts in the social sciences.

And finally, there are numerous Search Engines and Research Databases available free online to help you find information when nothing else works.

One last note, although I went online when Reagan was president, and I've had my own websites for over a decade, many of my pedagogical ideas achieved critical mass when I picked up Will Richardson's book last year. Much of what we will explore this semester can be found in his $30 book:

Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, And Other Powerful Web Tools For Classrooms
By Will Richardson (Paperback ISBN: 9781412927673)

Evaluation

Homework #1

Deliverable #1: Each student will imagine one way that classrooms will be different twenty years from now. Using the above research tools, find three articles that help describe your vision. Summarize the information in those three articles in 2-3 paragraphs. Here are some examples of publications that envision the future classroom:

You'll need to set up a free account using your email address at the Innovate Journal of Online Education to access the last two articles.

Deliverable #2: Students will form groups of no less than two and no more than three students. Each group will decide which content area (math, science, social science, art, or language arts) they will research for their lesson plans, etc. Each group will post a comment to this posting, listing their names and content area.
To post a comment, make sure you choose the "anonymous" identity before clicking on the 'Publish Your Comment' button. Include everyone's name in the group so I know who you are, otherwise, I'll just delete the comment.

Note: Once a group has posted their choice for a content area, no other group may choose that content area.

Deliverable #3: Each group will choose an Aim for a lesson plan appropriate to the chosen content area.

Deliverable #4: Each group will identify the New York State and New York City standards that align to the Aim.

Deliverable #5: Each group will use the ERIC search engine and the International Bibliographic Database on Higher Education, (any music lesson can also use the CAIRSS for Music database) to locate four articles that pertain instruction and delivery of that Aim. The research databases discussed above may also be used.

Deliverable #7: Each group will post a comment that includes their names, their Aim, the NYS and NYC standards, and the APA citations of the four research articles to this blog.

Deliverable #8: Each group will use the Lesson Plan Word Template to design and write a lesson plan based upon their ERIC research articles.

Deliverable #9: Each group will produce a 150 word essay that summarizes

the lesson plan Aim chosen
how the ERIC research articles helped shape the design of your lesson plan
the NYS standards that are applicable to your lesson plan, and
how you plan to implement this lesson plan

APA Citation Format

Citing an article requires including information that will allow anyone (including you) to find the article at a later date. Generally, you must include the author's name, the date of publication, the article's title, the page numbers, and the publisher. Use the following APA Citation Format examples to help create the correct citation format.

Article in Journal Paginated by Issue

Journals paginated by issue begin with page one every issue; therefore, the issue number gets indicated in parentheses after the volume. The parentheses and issue number are not italicized or underlined.

Scruton, R. (1996). The eclipse of listening. The New Criterion, 15(30), 5-13.

Article in a Magazine

Henry, W. A., III. (1990, April 9). Making the grade in today's schools. Time, 135, 28-31.

Article in a Newspaper

Unlike other periodicals, p. or pp. precedes page numbers for a newspaper reference in APA style. Single pages take p., e.g., p. B2; multiple pages take pp., e.g., pp. B2, B4 or pp. C1, C3-C4.

Schultz, S. (2005, December 28). Calls made to strengthen state energy policies. The Country Today, pp. 1A, 2A.

11/9/07

Finishing Up: How can we know students learned the lesson?

Her is what each group should have completed so far:

Read the three introductory articles, and write a wiki entry that describes one thing discussed in each article that you would like to implement in your classroom.
150 word summary of your research for your lesson plan, including

NYS Standards
How the research informed your lesson plan
How you plan to implement your lesson plan
4 APA Citations

A Word formatted lesson plan
Six Website links that have lesson plans similar to one you created, and descriptions that will be added to our link list.
Completing the following worksheets from the Recapping Blogs Website:

Common Blog Features
Blog Characteristics Sheet
Blogger Planning Sheet
Process Rubric Sheet

Completing the worksheets from the WebQuest About WebQuest site.
Adding content to the Wikispace webpage, including

150 word summary
Lesson Plan
Lesson Plan Websites
Materials for WebQuest
Lesson Plan Websites

Writing Regents Questions

The best way to find Regents questions appropriate to your lesson plan is to go online to the Regents archive and find the appropriate subject matter.