Teacher's+Home

Grade of Students:

5th - 8th

Objectives:


 * 1) The students will evaluate an online writing environment for its content as a "website".
 * 2) The students will evaluate an online writing environment for its content as a writing platform.
 * 3) Each student will create a writing sample using their assigned online writing environment to do so.
 * 4) The students will create a persuasive writing sample marketing why they like (or possibly dislike) their online writing environments (based on their evaluations done during Objectives 1 and 2).
 * 5) The students will create a collaboration environment using available Web 2.0 tools to assist them in their evaluations and work samples.
 * 6) The students will successfully collaborate as a team.

Assessments:

A Team Collaboration Rubric and Website Evaluation Criteria / Rubric have been supplied. The work samples (and thus their assessments) are dependent on the online writing environments that were evaluated and used to produce those samples. The persuasive work samples are also dependent on the media the teams choose to produce the samples. I have found that once the media are selected, the teacher (with students' input) can find applicable rubrics on [|RubiStar] using the keywords "Multimedia" and "Persuasive".

Overall, except for the areas covered already by the assessments and evaluations supplied, the teams and teacher should jointly agree on assessment methods and criteria; that, once the teams have established what the writing and discussion environments capablities are and have a conceptualized what their work products will be.

Instructions for the Teacher:


 * Familiarize yourself with both education purposes of wikis and the various online writing environment websites that are mentioned in this lesson. Make sure you understand the capabilities of the writing websites as both websites and as online writing environments; and this wiki and as both an educational and a discussional / collaborative environment.
 * Assign your students to be in 1 of up to 7 website evaluation teams.
 * Make sure time is available for computer time. This lesson unit should take 5 - 10 lesson periods depending work sample effort.
 * Consider using an Advanced Organizer like a [|BrainPop Online Sources] to help peak the students' interest and provide scaffolding for students' a priori knowledge.
 * Discuss with your teams the topic of the "intended audience" of their online writing environments. For example, if the team considers the website "babyish" because they are older than its intended audience; would it be valid to evaluate the website lower than they would have, otherwise.
 * A cautionary note from Blogs, Wikis, Docs Chart: "Users can overwrite each others' changes if they are editing the same page at the same time. Wikis are best for asynchronous collaboration, not synchronous collaboration."

Resources:

Use the following BrainPop video can be used as a Advanced Organizer for evaluating web resouces:

[|BrainPop Online Sources]

The following wiki's are helpful in exploring the uses of the wiki in education:

Educational Wikis

Blogs, Wikis, and Google Docs...