July 27, 2008
TECHNOS QUARTERLY Summer 2000 Vol. 9 No. 2
Teachers Building an Intranet: WebSchool Is Born
by Lisa Bartles
How can teachers be introduced to an instructional intranet that they can use to create projects, share ideas, and build teamwork among students? This technology expert devised a summer WebSchool institute for her school district—and it proved to be a very popular professional development technique.
I had been interested in the idea of an instructional intranet for a few years. My vision included student projects created over different grade spans, interdisciplinary projects linked together, and student-created independent study posted for others to see. I hoped such a space would promote collaboration and the opportunity for teachers to try new ideas, such as multi-age projects. Although an intranet would not be a substitute for face-to-face collaboration, I hoped that it would create a variety of opportunities for teachers and students to interact and share thoughts, ideas, studies, and creations in ways which can be difficult in a physical space.
For example, anyone strolling down a school hallway will see student artwork. If the artwork is not permanent, capturing images of that art for a web space which includes student commentary on their work and viewer comments would help students reflect on what they created long after the art has been removed or updated. Parents could continue to see the display, and students could learn about the difference between digital and hand-created artwork as well as how others react to art.
An intranet where students upload work, teachers upload projects, and students across grades and disciplines collaborate by posting information would be a very good way to create a learning community. Students researching topics would share their work with other students throughout the school. Multi-age projects would be developed. Projects would become part of a school’s instructional archive, with new projects added from year to year. A web environment would make all of this easy to accomplish and technologically current. I also had another incentive to pursue this: I absolutely knew that teachers and students would create uses and items for this space, some of which I could not anticipate. The idea of creating an open-ended tool capable of at least accomplishing what I could imagine, but fully capable of reflecting someone else’s imagination, was irresistible to me.
WebSchool Institute Is Developed
In 1997, the school district where I worked did not yet have intranets; creating
them was an exciting instructional idea. In order to excite teachers about
how an intranet would contribute to a school environment, I would first have
to develop and direct a process to get teachers interested in creating and
submitting their own web pages to a server. Perhaps more important, teachers
needed to experience a collaborative web-based environment. To get the ball
rolling, I planned some staff development.
An intranet where students upload work, teachers upload projects, and students across grades and disciplines collaborate by posting information would be a very good way to create a learning community.
WebSchool, a summer teacher institute designed to teach collaboration using web-based resources, took shape during the fall of 1997. As director of instructional technology for the Chapel Hill-Carrboro (NC) Schools, I selected the WebSchool instructors with help from the schools’ information systems management (MIS) director and the director of staff development. Applicants for instructor positions were excited about this program and brought good ideas about what training teachers would need. After selecting instructors, the WebSchool team—consisting of the instructors, the MIS director, and myself—planned a weeklong teacher institute for the summer of 1998. I had the basic framework for the institute already outlined, and the WebSchool team began to flesh out particulars such as workshops, project focus, and the week’s schedule.
There were several things the new WebSchool team had to decide.
- We needed to choose and learn the web page authoring program we intended to teach during the institute.
- We had to decide on an instructional approach to the staff development. What kind of project should teachers do? How could that project stress collaboration, interdisciplinary study, technology, and still incorporate teacher interests without being overwhelming? How could we incorporate different computer platforms? How could we make this fun?
- We needed to choose what workshops to offer and to consider how teachers would accomplish all we hoped they would within a week’s time.
- Not to be forgotten: we had to solve issues about creating an on-site intranet for the event and moving extra computers to the institute from other schools.
As soon as WebSchool was announced (in February), we had many applications from teachers excited to attend a workshop about web resources. We limited the number of participants to 50 in order to get a low participant/instructor ratio (10 to 1). During WebSchool ’98, we were almost at capacity. By WebSchool ’99, we had more participants than room. It would have been difficult to decide whether the participants or the WebSchool team was more excited to get started. When two instructor slots opened up before WebSchool ’99, several technology specialists and teachers were interested in joining the team.
Year One: WebSchool ’98
To begin, the team chose Claris HomePage™ as the HTML authoring tool
and a web server product that was bundled with a new instructional server
the district had already purchased from Apple Computer. We tried to make choices
which would not require large sums of money or which would cause significant
installation. There simply wasn’t time to develop a new infrastructure,
and we wanted to work with what was already available. Ephesus Road Elementary
school was chosen as the WebSchool site for three reasons: one of the WebSchool
instructors was the technology specialist there, we had the support of the
principal, and that school had purchased new computers. Personal computers
from East Chapel Hill High School and Macintoshes from Ephesus Elementary
would be placed on the school’s local area network (LAN) and linked to
the web server.
The longer discussions and more difficult choices for the institute centered, appropriately, on the instructional focus of the institute. The WebSchool team began by choosing a general project topic/problem for the week. I decided how the project should be structured. Teacher teams would address a main topic by studying a specific aspect of that topic/problem. To that end, we placed teachers in discipline-like groups. High school math teachers worked with other high school math teachers, for example.
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Teachers received Continuing Education Units (3) for attending the institute and the right to use Claris Home Page™ on their school computers. Teachers were not paid stipends for attending. Our web server was a Macintosh G3, with pre-packaged web server software. Our web page creation software was Claris HomePage™ 3.0. Our participants used both Macs and PCs during the week. Each institute had approximately 50 participants, with 4 instructors, a director/instructor, and periodic clerical help. WebSchool instructors received stipends for working at WebSchool. |
We also decided the topic should be of local interest. Engaging participants without introducing a new, completely foreign topic was important. We wanted teachers to focus on learning technology and using it in collaborative ways, not to focus on a topic outside their experience. Consequently, the project asked teachers to look at our local community and address one of five issue areas relating to community changes caused by population growth over the last ten years. Each issue area paralleled a specific discipline. The WebSchool team defined the issue areas as:
- Developing Individuals (how the community has affected its citizens)
- Past into Present (history of the community)
- Diversity of Expression (local authors, artists, and their connections to the community)
- Changing Demographics (population changes)
- Biodiversity (environmental impact of growth)
In addition to planning the project content, WebSchool instructors were assigned specific tasks. Those tasks involved editing the WebSchool notebook, setting up the intranet and managing the WebSchool web site, acquiring print resources for research, and preparing specific materials for PC users. During WebSchool ’98, a parent volunteer (the wife of our MIS Director) created daily web pages about the institute. These pages were mounted on the district web site for general information and for participants to share with others. During WebSchool ’99, an instructor assumed that task.
Before the institute began, instructors placed teachers in teams based on discipline or teaching assignment, creating ten teams of four to five participants. We wanted to place teachers in “job alike” groups to foster quicker collaboration and simply because teachers had often been put in heterogeneous groupings for other training. Teachers often said they would very much like to spend time with similarly assigned colleagues. Although teacher teams were planned in advance by the WebSchool instructors, teams chose their issue areas from those listed. Generally, teams chose an issue area that paralleled their interests. Teams identifying themselves as interested in science instruction often chose to address biodiversity, for instance. (Demographics and traffic proved especially compelling to some teams.)
Each team of teachers researched its particular issue area as it related to growth of the community, and each member learned to create web pages. Using information and newly acquired skills, teams created a series of web pages addressing the main topic (community change through growth) through their chosen issue area (demographics, for instance). Most often, teams sub-divided issue areas into more specific topics, with individual members creating web pages linked to the overall group effort. For example, one group called itself “Data Diggers” and researched issues associated with changing demographics of the community. The “Data Diggers” created four different web pages addressing how demographic changes affect the community.
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Monday: Build Your Expertise with Internet Searches, Claris
Home Page™, and group formation Tuesday: Build Your Knowledge Base with Specialty Workshops,
and group research Wednesday: Build Your Page with More Specialty Areas, and
more group work Thursday: Build the Web as You Link Your Pages, and web-up!
Friday: Build the Web and Celebrate! |
By the end of the week, each team’s web pages linked to the main WebSchool web page where we described the initial problem (Community Growth), and included links to each team’s specific issue area. Teams linked their pages to at least two other teams’ pages and to at least two outside (Internet) sites as well. Teachers became excited about the connections between their work and other teams’ work in addition to all the outside links which could be added. Each workroom echoed with enthusiastic comments: “It worked!”—“So, if I tell the search engine to use ‘or’ here…”—“This is easier than I thought.”— “My students could make a web about authors.” Like any group of students though, the WebSchool team occasionally had to lead teachers away from clever graphics and animation and back to the project work.
Ultimately, the teacher teams created a web of information about changes in our community, addressing several issues of local interest. Teachers saw their work connected to work by other teams and learned about other issues related to community growth. In addition, teams saw how all the web pages reflected different aspects of the same larger issue, stressing the interdisciplinary nature of project-based learning. Perhaps most important, teachers shared their learning experiences with each other.
New Approaches for WebSchool ’99 Each day during WebSchool ’98, we asked participants to tell us what was working and what wasn’t. Using this information, we made whatever instant accommodations we could. Each day, teachers would also tell us their “geek moments”—points at which they felt particularly computer savvy. The following day, we gave a prize for the most “geeky” moment. Based on more serious teacher comments during WebSchool ’98, WebSchool ’99 saw some changes, particularly to the project portion of the institute. The year one project had been very “educational” in that it directed teachers to specific disciplines and made links between content and process very clear. Some participants told us this was too prescriptive. It was summer break, after all! Teachers wanted an opportunity to be more creative and to blow off a little steam. And, just like their students, they wanted school to be fun.
Teachers
participating in WebSchool learned to develop web pages, to use a school intranet,
to collaborate on technology use—and they had fun.
Consequently, for WebSchool ’99, we changed the project approach. We decided to keep the focus on the collaborative, interdisciplinary process and learning new technology, but to make the project topic more creative. We changed the project to “Teacher Personality Web,” a project designed to encompass the wide (and potentially nutty) interests of our teacher participants. In order to create a truly linked web within one week’s time, instructors chose five interest areas that would relate to the main idea of a “Teacher Personality Web.” The issue areas included:
- Creation Zone (what would you create and why?)
- Dinner Party (five people you would invite to dinner and why?)
- Free Birds (where would you go, if you had a chance?)
- Hassles (what makes you crazy and why?)
- Human Connections (what three people do you think were “separated at birth” and why?)
Teachers signed up for a topic on day one and created their own teams of four to five members. Unlike year one, WebSchool ’99 instructors did not pre-select the teams based on teaching assignment. Teachers chose their own groups. An important design aspect of WebSchool was that all interest areas must relate to the larger topic. That linkage creates a web of information rather than unconnected, discreet web pages. Therefore, in order to get things going for such a short institute, we pre-selected a list of subtopics for the teacher teams to choose from.
Earlier, the WebSchool team decided that a more lighthearted approach to the project portion might be more engaging for the 1999 summer institute. With more lighthearted issue areas, process took center stage. As during WebSchool ’98, all teams created a series of pages which were linked to the institute’s main page, and all teams researched information relevant to their subtopic. As before, each group’s pages reflected an aspect of the larger topic—in this case, the “Teacher Personality Web.” One team chose to invite historic women to a dinner party; another chose to plan a trip to South Africa; and another group tried to persuade us that President Clinton, Mother Theresa, and Maya Angelou were really “separated at birth.” We had a lot of fun.
The schedule for WebSchool ’99 was largely the same as for year one (see “Some Practical Details of WebSchool,”), with the same focal points each day, such as “Build Your Knowledge.” For WebSchool ’99 though, some of the mid-week workshops were changed based on comments from the previous year. Creating web page tables was now part of the workshop on Claris HomePage™ because so many web pages use tables to create a finished look. In 1999, specialty workshops included graphics for Macs, graphics for PCs, digital cameras and scanners, and a web page creation software package for young children. Both WebSchool ’98 and ’99 featured Macintosh and PCs for teachers to use.
Each day, teachers would tell us their “geek moments”—points at which they felt particularly computer savvy.
One of the highlights of WebSchool ’99 occurred on Monday during a session by three participants from WebSchool ’98. A media specialist and two teachers presented web projects and pages they developed after attending WebSchool ’98. The media specialist discussed Internet search strategies and shared her newly created media center web site. One teacher created a class web page where students could download assignments, get information about tests, and email the teacher. A sick child accessed this page at home during the school year and came back to school with all assignments completed, ready to continue. That parent was very pleased, as was the teacher.
The other teacher worked with her fourth-grade students during the previous school year to create “Explorers’ Web.” Her students created web pages about specific explorers and uploaded these to the school web server. She told participants how much her students became involved in the project and how excited they were to do this project on an intranet. Luckily for WebSchool ’99 participants, this teacher was a WebSchool ’99 instructor. Bringing back WebSchool ’98 graduates to show web-based projects they developed was a wonderful way to show new participants what avenues they could explore. Although I focused on project-based learning in a web environment, I was still thrilled to see teachers use their skills to create web pages that addressed other areas of concern, such as parent communication and enabling students to use media center resources more effectively.
During both years, the WebSchool team polled teachers daily to determine what issues we might be able to resolve before the next day. At the end of the week, we also distributed an evaluation form. Daily concerns generally related to room temperature, food, facilities, and other such issues. If comments reflected concern about projects or pacing, the WebSchool team adapted, making changes to accommodate participants’ needs.
On the final evaluation, participants’ frustrations were often directed at time; there was not enough of it! Another frustration was the project itself. Some teachers preferred the approach in WebSchool ’98, while others preferred the project in WebSchool ’99. We felt that a hybrid of the two projects could probably be developed without much difficulty.
Reflections
As an instructional technology director, I wanted WebSchool to be fun, informative,
and at the same time an instructional simulation for teachers interested in
designing web-based projects for students. Teachers experienced group work,
an interconnected project, new technology, and examples of how they might
use this for or with their own students. Many other applications of web-based
resources to create a learning community came about partially as a result
of WebSchool, including a web site by a high school department of work force
development and a school-wide effort to make class information, assignments,
and projects available on the Internet. Some teachers continued to offer homework
and assignment information on web pages, and some expressed interest in the
project approach. Some even talked of developing courses or extra-credit opportunities
for students using a web-based environment.
Teachers experienced group work, an interconnected project, new technology, and examples of how they might use this for or with their own students.
One of the ways I measure the quality of staff development is by how adaptable the learning is to different educational needs. By this measure, WebSchool succeeded wonderfully. The variety of web-based applications from school to school and teacher to teacher was very exciting, and I couldn’t wait to see what would be developed next. As teachers commented to a newspaper reporter on hand each summer, they felt they were learning valuable, current technology skills—and they had more fun and learned more than they had expected. With such an adaptable tool as an intranet, I know I will continue to be surprised by teachers and students.
Lisa
Bartles is a Technology Literacy Challenge Fund consultant from Modis for
the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction. She served as director
of instructional technology and media services for the Chapel Hill-Carrboro
City (NC) Schools from 1997-99. A former English teacher, Ms. Bartles is a
graduate of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and the University
of Tennessee at Knoxville, where she earned her master's degree in education.
Contact her at lbartles@dpi.state.nc.us.