Spotlight on the 1997
SIGTel
Online Award Winners
Right in My Own Backyard
Karen
Turpin
Kim Johnson
Cedar Valley
Middle School
8139 Racine Trail
Austin, TX,
78717
USA
Project
Description
For this statewide project, guidelines were written by a group of
participating
history teachers, computer teachers, and librarians in the hosting
school district.
Each participating campus investigated topics of historical interest
in its
local area, and prepared a Web presentation that included a title
page, narrative,
sources, and acknowledgments. Students were encouraged to use primary
sources,
make site visits, and verify information before publishing the final
product.
Students were grouped into teams to study broad topics that they chose
after
viewing a videotape of local history and browsing print materials
gathered by
the teachers and school librarian. Letters were sent to parents
explaining the
project and inviting them to assist the students with their
investigations.
The chamber of commerce, city planning department, city library, local
historians,
and state historical commission all provided information as the
students investigated
their specific topics.
Author
Reflections
Deadlines are always difficult, but the one for this telecomputing
project
in May 1997 was nerve-wracking. Would I really be able to publish a
Web
site containing projects from distant participating classes? What if
none of
the participants finished? Would my novice Web skills be sufficient?
What if
our own local group of students participating in the project couldn't
pull it off in time? We constantly found prose that needed editing,
colors that
students couldn't live with, and pictures that were too big, too
light,
or too dark. Our files were scattered over several hard drives and
floppies.
It was difficult to remember which files contained the latest and best
versions
of our work.
I had been working all year with a group of participating teachers
from across
the state, some of whom I had never met. Our original plan was to
communicate
through a newsgroup during the project year. However, the
technicalities of
posting proved a challenge to many of the participants, and we soon
abandoned
it in favor of e-mail. That was a disappointment, as I had hoped for
more
discussion among the participants. Sometimes we would not hear from a
participating
teacher for over a month. In a few instances, the prolonged silence
meant they
had dropped out. This was something I had not anticipated, and it
concerned
me throughout the year.
Participants brought a wide variety of Internet experience. Some were
already
doing Web pages on their own servers, others had never seen HTML, and
one had
never seen the Web in graphical form. I recruited participants by
picking schools
in interesting towns from a Texas travel guide. In many of the school
districts,
only administrators (and an occasional band director) had e-mail
accounts!
When all of the pages were finally posted (a few weeks AFTER school
was out)
it was a thrilling experience to browse through the projects to see
what we
had created. We all learned a great deal about our communities and
established
new relationships. The completed narratives reveal that groups used a
variety
of methods to gather information, which is now online: http://www-tenet.cc.utexas.edu/pub/minigrants/turpin.
[Note: This site is no longer active.]
Some of us have decided to try this again. We have invited interested
Texas
teachers from any grade level or discipline to join us for the
1997–98
year. We're a small, friendly group, willing to help, and we expect
things
will be easier the second time around!
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