KENT, Washington—When students search for information online, they're apt to encounter a wide range of resources. "Some Web sites are great, some not so great," says Dana Standlee, a teacher at Emerald Park Elementary located in this suburb of Seattle. "Kids need to learn to skim through Web sites and know how to evaluate them."
That was one of several lessons embedded in a recent classroom project that began with a Webquest to gather information about Native American tribes. The in-depth project integrated social studies and writing, and also taught fourth-graders how to manage their time and work effectively in teams. "There were several different lessons along the way," Standlee says.
Students organized their online research findings with "bubble maps."
She teamed with three other teachers to map out the unit, using planning time the school sets aside to encourage staff to develop project-based units. Standlee is an enthusiastic user of classroom technology. She teaches at a new school that was built to incorporate everything from laptop computers to a mobile multimedia production station. She also spends two years with the same students, who loop with her from third to fourth grade. By their second year in her classroom, she says, "They have already used technology in purposeful ways. We have done electronic presentations, made Web pages, and completed several other assignments using technology as a tool. A Webquest offered one more avenue of technology to explore."
She begins each new project with a "driving question." For this unit she wanted students to consider: "What was it like to live as a Native American in the Pacific Northwest in the early 1800s?" More specifically, she wanted students to work with a partner to compare information about two different tribes, one from a coastal region and the other from the plains.
Standlee wanted to guide students to Web sites that would offer useful and appropriate information. That involved some research time for the teacher. When she did her own Web search for sites about Native Americans, she came up with "sites that had to do with gambling, casinos, lotteries, or advertisements that make them inappropriate for students. I spent a whole day looking for presentable sites," she says.
Once it was the students' turn to conduct online research, Standlee encouraged them to be critical readers. "It's good for students to learn how to weed through sites. They have to learn to skim and scan, and evaluate for quality in the text itself, as well as its source," she says.