This month's column continues May's focus on setting up the lab environment so that you can retain your sanity and the students can do their best. Part I dealt with scaffolding, students as experts, helping students, and planning for projects.
Part II tries to provide details on mini-lessons, peer
conferences, sharing, and publishing. No matter what the goal is,
managing the lab environment is continuously challenging and usually
involves careful planning. A repertoire of strategies helps.
One great way to start a lab session is with a five-to-ten minute mini-lesson. The mini-lesson can be used to teach computer skills, show examples, or to focus the students on what they will be doing for the class period. Though mini-lessons typically take place in the lab, you can do them in the classroom just before going to the lab.
For a successful mini-lesson you will need a computer and some sort of presentation device. The most common (and often cheapest) set-up is a computer connected to a television with a scan converter. The main complaint about that set-up is that the text can be a little fuzzy and it can be difficult for students in the back to see. An added benefit to the scan converter is that you can also run it into your VCR and tape your presentations or your students'. Even better than a TV is a LCD projector, though they are far more expensive.
Mini-lessons do not need to be taught by the teacher. One of the best ways to achieve the multiple objectives of boosting students' self-esteem, reminding students who the class experts are, and allowing yourself to be the guide on the side is to have students or teams of students plan and teach the mini-lessons. You can pick the students who demonstrate the best mastery of the skill, or you can seed the experts by having a few students come in early or stay in for lunch to learn a new skill.
Keep in mind that mini-lessons don't have to occur at the
beginning of a lab session and need not involve the entire class.
Mini-lessons can occur whenever needed and are great for remediation
and for challenging those students ready to move beyond.
Another technique that greatly enhances projects is student to student conferences. As a single classroom teacher, it is impossible to be everywhere at once. However, a classroom full of students can more effectively teach each other than a single teacher can alone. Of course, students can only effectively teach each other if they are given the chance to learn and practice the roles of being an audience or helpful critic. Having students work together and share their learning, capitalizes on their perspectives, their language, and their ways of interacting with one another.
Student conferencing is a natural part of team projects with ideas and editing taking place as needed. In the beginning, students need a mini-lesson or two on how to edit and offer constructive criticism. At times you may also want to set aside lab time just for editing, especially if you have a formal checklist for the students to go through.
If your students are working individually, you will need to build in time for conferencing. Students can get together at the beginning or end of class for an informal review of each other's work. If you do it at the end of class, the students should write their questions and suggestions on paper, otherwise the students will forget most of their ideas by the next time you get to the lab.
Or, set up specific checkpoints for the projects that require a
partner to review the student's progress before they come to you for
final editing. With checkpoints, students peer review their work at
several points instead of only at the end, when they have little
desire to go back and make anything more than superficial
changes.
The idea of Sharing as a specific part of class comes, like many of our ideas, from Writer's Workshop. There are many different ways to have students share their plans, works-in-progress, and finished work. Sharing can be as simple as having two students or two groups of students sit down together and go through all or part of their project.
Another method for sharing is "Musical Chairs." At the end of class, have the students save their work and open it up to the beginning. Then, the students move a certain number of computers to their right or left and look through that project. Students can leave comments for the author(s) on a piece of paper at that computer. If you have more time, the students can continue rotating to different projects.
MetaStacks are an even more powerful way to share student work, though they can be time-consuming at first and should only be created when all the students have finished their projects. MetaStacks are a way to visually and electronically link all students' projects. They allow students to quickly jump from one project to another and can be created in most hypermedia environments including HyperStudio and WWW pages. (For more information on MetaStacks, please read the article "Hypermedia Projects: MetaStacks Increase Content Focus" in Learning & Leading With Technology, November 1996.)
Another powerful method of sharing is an "Author's Chair." Instead of having a mini-lesson at the beginning or end of class, you can have an "Author's Chair." Students can present:
This and the other methods of sharing are an opportunity for
classmates to evaluate their work, to celebrate what they're doing,
and to explain their learning to one another.
Publishing is really just another means of sharing, though it is only done when the students' projects are complete. Publishing is also a means for sharing beyond the classroom to a wider and more authentic audience.
Some projects lend themselves to printing, though they often lose the exciting elements of sound, animation, or video. Nevertheless, it is important to post the students' work throughout the classroom or the lab setting. Printing their work and hanging copies up can stimulate students' ideas and lets them know that we value their efforts and ideas.
Fortunately, there are several ways to get beyond the limitations of paper and color ink which don't lose the richness of the multiple media the students incorporated. One of the easiest methods of publishing is to put the students' finished work on a disk, Zip disk, or CD-ROM. Even if there is a "player" version of the program included on the disk, it still means that only those people with the right equipment may see the project. With the number of variables involved, this method often only works for a few students.
A method that is more likely viewable by others is to videotape the project. By running a scan-converter and audio cable from your computer to a VCR you can tape and hear anything from the computer. Sound, animation and video all are publishable.
Also, if you use an audio mixer you can add additional narration, sound effects, or music. Unfortunately, using this method means that hypermedia projects with non-linear links can only be experienced in a linear fashion. However, most students have access to a VCR for showing their projects to parents, siblings, and relatives.
A newer method, with some of the benefits and drawbacks of the two
previous methods, provides a fourth option. Through the WWW it is
possible to share word processing documents, HyperStudio
stacks, web pages, and more. Two of the bigger issues related to this
method are access to a web server and home access. As the web
evolves, this option is likely to become easier and more
powerful.
Many of the ideas in this these two columns have been modified from ideas found elsewhere. If you are looking for more ideas to help you keep your sanity and increase your students learning, try looking through the literature on Writer's Workshop, project-based learning, or inquiry-based learning.
The ideas expressed above are drawn from experiences at Birmingham Covington School and Elliott Elementary (especially Beth Scholten) and the work of Calkins, McKenzie, Newkirk, Eisenberg & Berkowitz, and many others.
© Jordy Whitmer 1999