Technology Integration

      While working with Jim Moulton (jrmoulton.googlepages.com) last week, we witnessed the effectiveness of teacher web pages in the elementary lab while working with 4th graders on a biography unit.  Earlier in the day we took the teacher’s list of famous folks, and each taking a few names, found one appropriate site for the students.Jim added the pages to his page at http://jrmoulton.googlepages.com/grade4research Next, I added the web spring to the docks of all 4th graders so all they’d have to do is to click on the icon to go to his page after they logged in. When we got to the lab, all students had to do was to click the mouse and find the name of their person, clicking on that to go to the web site that we had found for them. This was a pretty quick way of focusing student attention on the topic without their having to hunt throughout the web to find information. What was clear to us was what would happen had we NOT done this.  Six or seven students who did not normally come with this group happened to attend this day. None of their subjects were listed on Jim’s page.  We had to sit down with each one of them, search the web for appropriate content, and then have them bookmark the site. This took some extra time and could have been avoided had the information be on the web page at the start of the lesson. I tried to compare what happened with a teacher who had photocopied hand outs for 20 students and realized that the machine had miscounted after getting back to the classroom with her students. What do you tell the students who are left out? Come back later? Wait until I can send someone to the office for extra copies? Work with someone else? Copy it by hand? This experience underscores the point that Jim has been saying to me this spring, “In 2008, every teacher needs a web page.”  see Jim Moulton’s post at  http://www.edutopia.org/classroom-web-page