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Students Use Inspiration to "Web the Web"
All across the country, educators are being converted to the World
Wide Web. It can revolutionize education, they say. With just a
computer, a modem and a telephone line, teachers and their students can
reach people and resources around the globe - resources of a greater
breadth and higher quality than those available locally.
| However, there are some practical difficulties with using the
World Wide Web in the classroom. The Web contains vast amounts
of information on an infinite array of subjects, all equally
diverting. So when students (and teachers) are searching for
information on a specific topic, how can they remain focused? |
For
more information on using Inspiration
with the web (and other multimedia), see the "Sample
Diagrams" section of this site. |
Larry Lewin and Vicky Ayers, teachers at James Monroe Middle School
in Eugene, Oregon, have an answer. It's like anything else, Mr. Lewin
says: pre-planning is the key. He described it this way. "Kids love
the adventure" of the Web, "but they get deflated when they
don't find what they're looking for. Their attention span requires a
successful search, and pre-planning a search ... increases their chances
of success. It is like a writing assignment: if the author takes some
time to 'prepare' before launching into a draft, then the drafting goes
easier."
This year, Mr. Lewin and Ms. Ayers planned a research assignment that
students could conduct over the Web. For the Civil War unit in his
history section, Mr. Lewin asked the class to search for information on
specific individuals, then turn what they learned into a report. First,
however, they had to plan their search using Inspiration.
Eighth grade student Shabree diagrammed a search for information on
Harriet Beecher Stowe. She made Harriet Beecher Stowe her main idea,
then created different symbol subtopics to show what she hoped to learn
about Ms. Stowe. Her symbols listed such concepts as "role in the
war" and "thoughts about slavery." Then, as she conducted
her search on the Web, Shabree elaborated her diagram to include what
she'd learned.
Fellow student Jessica's search worked much the same way. Dred Scott
was her main idea, and her subtopics included "biography,"
"military service," and "why join the military?"
When she learned that Mr. Scott "lived with owner, John Emerson, in
the South until they moved up north to the Louisiana Territory, where
slavery was against the law," she wrote that entire text under the
subtopic "biography." Since Jessica could take the information
she learned off the Web and immediately copy-and-paste it into her
Inspiration diagram, her search was all the more tightly focused.
Mr. Lewin had used Inspiration as a pre-planning tool for other
student projects before, but this was the first time he'd used it for
planning Web research. (He calls it "webbing the Web.") He
says that he found it to be a vital tool. "I believe that many
teachers will become disillusioned with the [Web] when they discover how
challenging it really is; they'll be looking for a way to structure
student success. Hello, Inspiration!"
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