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September 1, 1998
Online Projects
by Leslie Nicodemus
I have just completed my first year as the Instructional Technology Specialist
at St. Thomas Episcopal School, after being a classroom teacher for many years. At St.
Thomas, we are lucky enough to have a technology staff that consists of a lab teacher, a
network administrator, and myself. I worked with the classroom teachers, doing projects
with small groups and whole classes.
Two of the projects were web site contests. What an experience that was! I, with
no experience in web site design, worked with children, some of whom had never seen a web
site! Talk about the blind leading the blind. I, oh so naively, set out to do two separate
projects that had the same deadline date. One was for Thinkquest Junior, involving 6 fifth
graders (the maximum number allowed). The other was for CyberFair, where 15 fourth graders
participated, five from each of three classes. These are my experiences in putting
together these projects.
Choosing a software product to build these web pages was the first challenge.
After looking at several and discarding them, I finally settled on Digital Chisel
by Pierian Springs. It suited my needs in that it had a fairly simple interface, but it
was powerful enough to do most of what we needed. As it turned out, they have an excellent
support staff, thank goodness!
The next step was to decide on the topics and the students who would be
involved. The classroom teachers chose the students. Picking the topic was easy for the
fourth graders. Since they study Florida, we picked the "Local and ManMade
Attractions" category of CyberFair. We decided to have the students expand on and
share the information they had gathered about places they visited on school field trips.
The fifth grade group was a bit more difficult. We brainstormed about topics and
finally decided on Endangered Species of Florida for the Science category of ThinkQuest
Junior for two reasons. There is a science resource person at our school who is very
knowledgeable about the topic and we knew we could get a lot of information from her.
Because all fourth graders statewide study Florida, we hoped that both sites could be used
by schools throughout the state.
After the topics were decided, the real planning began. Both groups spent a long
time on planning. Since the fourth grade had such a large group, the whole group would
meet only occasionally (we called it our board meeting), but most of the time the groups
each had five students. What a wonderful experience it was to listen to the children
discuss what they wanted to include in the site and how they wanted to do it. In both
projects, the children made all the decisions as to the layout of the project, the
material that was going to be included, and who was going to do what part of it.
Next came the research. Much of this was done on the children’s own time or
in the classroom. The children used a variety of sources to get their information.
When some of the material was gathered, we began the process of transferring the
data into Digital Chisel. This turned out to be very time consuming, so I typed in
some of the information myself. The best method was to have the children type the
information at home using Word and then bring it to school on a disk. We could then easily
bring it into Digital Chisel.
Adding the graphics was the next step. The children became proficient in finding
pictures on the Internet and bringing them into the project. Many of the fourth
graders’ pictures were photographs that they had taken during their field trips.
These photos then had to be scanned, edited, and put into the proper page. I was so
thrilled when, after a few times of doing it myself, I could send fourth graders to the
scanner and have them tell me they used the right dpi and the jpg format! Talk about a
learning curve! Some of the children even learned to use the Photo software that was on
the computer to further refine the pictures.
There were many snags along the way. One of the biggest blunders I made was not
thinking about citing pictures that had been taken from the Internet in the bibliography.
So, when it came time to do the bibliography, everyone had to go back and try to remember
where the pictures had come from so they could email the source for permission to use the
picture. Talk about panic, when the deadline for the contests was rapidly approaching!
Other problems came when we wanted to do some things that Digital Chisel did not
allow, like moving graphics apart. In came HTML. All of a sudden, I was looking at source
code, reading books, and learning HTML at a rapid pace. Another high point was when one of
the students became so enamored with HTML that he got his own book and was telling me how
to do things!
Little things sometimes became big deals. Putting in a dropped capital letter
took an entire weekend of emailing back and forth between the network administrator and
me!
When asked what they learned from the project, the board would say in unison,
"How to shut down the computer!"
After the projects were submitted, the CyberFair project required us to evaluate
six web sites from other schools. That was an interesting process also. The children not
only enjoyed looking at other sites, but gained even more insight into what constitutes a
good web site.
Both projects required a lot of work on my part. Doing two at once was not such
a great idea. BUT the results were fantastic! The children learned so much in so many
areas, including the subject matter, about the technology, and working together. Copyright
laws were an eye-opener to them. All of them are eager to do it again. There was a happy
ending, too. The Cyberfair site placed in the top ten in our category, in competition with
international schools of all grade levels, up to and including high school seniors..
The URLs are:
http://cyberfair.gsn.org//stthomas
http://tqjunior.advanced.org//3822
Email: Leslie Nicodemus
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