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A creative alternative: Student-authored multimedia
When students are charged with creating media used to teach their peers, they exceed teacher expectations and learn a lot. By Jan Johnson |
 ennifer
twisted in her chair as her eyes darted around the room."Joel, Ashley!" she called, gesturing for them to come over to her computer. "Look at this!" Her friends stared intently at the monitor as Jennifer put her animation into motion. A test tube poured bubbling liquid into an overflowing beaker as the title of her HyperCard presentation, "All About Moles," appeared across the screen. "My Chemistry II teacher is going to use my stack to teach her freshmen about moles," Jennifer explained. "I've finished scripting all the hypertext links and importing the graphics, but I wanted to give it a cool intro before I present it." Jennifer and her friends discussed the merits of her stack as I eavesdropped. Joel especially liked the drawing of a real mole, with fur and claws, surrounded by the universal no symbol. "My teacher said that most people think of the animal, and not the unit of measurement, when they hear the word mole," Jennifer said. "I thought this graphic would help get the message across that we're not talking about furry little animals here. And I used the overflowing beaker to suggest the vast quantity of matter that a mole represents." The mole stack also included a report featuring hypertext, or hot words that Jennifer had programmed to be clickable. When a user clicked the mouse on a bold word, the screen displayed more information, a clarification or example, and usually a graphic. |
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 This HyperCard stack was written by Jennifer Curlee in 1990 for her sophomore Chemistry I class. It features an animation and a hypertext essay about moles (not the furry kind!) |
 t was the 1990-91
school year, and what had begun as an experiment the
year before was becoming part of the regular curriculum at this small rural
high school. Now, instead of a traditional book report, research paper,
or group project, many students were writing original multimedia presentations
and sharing them with their classes. Surprisingly, expensive equipment and technology experts were definitely not in the picture. With fewer than 300 students and 25 teachers, Karnes City High School is located in one of the more economically disadvantaged areas in South Texas, 60 miles southeast of San Antonio. There are no high-tech industries or universities nearby to provide technical support or human resources. |
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n spite of
these obstacles, though, the school had
several advantages that helped make the new program possible. Smaller class
size, at the time averaging about 15 students, made more one-on-one instruction
possible as students were first learning how to use the software. The faculty
had a low turnover rate, so team teaching and collaboration were facilitated
by the friendships that had grown over the years. Another major factor
in the success of the project was the writing lab program itself. Instead
of merely providing a room full of computers, the district had committed
the funds to employ a full-time, certified English
teacher to set up the program and then manage the small
lab, assisting the regular classroom teachers with writing projects. Since I had written the original proposal for the writing lab program, and since I had a strong interest in technology, our administrators decided to give me this assignment. In the fall of 1989, I opened the Writing Lab on the first day of school. With no regular classes of my own, I was able to schedule blocks of time in the lab for any class and then work with the students and their teachers to design and facilitate different types of writing projects. We planned to use the lab mainly for word processing, but soon discovered HyperCard and started finding ways to work it into the curriculum. After observing our students' enthusiasm, as well as their high scores on the state-mandated writing test, the subject area teachers and I decided it was a worthwhile alternative instructional strategy. With the growing interest and involvement of the rest of the faculty, students in almost every subject area were writing stacks on topics ranging from Shakespearean themes to insect classification. |
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 doption
of this new strategy was not entirely based
on student enthusiasm, however. Increased motivation, employment of higher-level
thinking skills, and more flexibility in adapting to varying learning styles
were addressed by the project as well. Having students take responsibility for their own learning, for example, is a proven motivational technique. Since they felt a sense of ownership in their presentations, students usually went far beyond the teacher-specified minimum requirements for a passing grade. They scoured the libraries for information and photos, examined CD-ROM and floppy disk media collections for sounds and graphics, and sometimes used e-mail to solicit outside help. Often, they would create their own media resources: Eric used a digital camera to photograph local plants for his biology stack, while Jennifer put a straw in a glass of water to record bubbling sounds for her "Moles" title screen. |
 he majority
of their presentations included far more
information than we expected; more importantly, though, students
seemed to internalize the information and concepts as they presented their
stacks to their peers and explained what they had learned. There was a
certain pride of ownership involved, as well as empowerment; the authors
of these stacks had each created something unique by using the computer
as a tool under their control, rather than as a drill-and-practice machine.
Gathering information was not the primary object, though; it was obvious that students were employing critical thinking skills above the knowledge level of Bloom's Taxonomy. Because of the many options available to students in this mode of presentation, they were able to make connections and see relationships between the various facts, concepts, and opinions they encountered in their research. For example, while writing a stack about the Romantic movement in British literature, a student looking for appropriate sounds discovered that the music from this period reflected characteristics similar to those of the poems she was discussing. She added several cards to her stack to explain these similarities and to introduce several of the major composers of the period. Not only were students using critical thinking skills, they were also using a variety of learning styles as they worked. Instead of the predominantly visual learning style addressed by traditional research reports, the auditory and kinesthetic styles were involved as students used voice, music, sound effects, and text-to-speech to enhance meaning, and used the keyboard and mouse to create buttons and to provide for interaction in their stacks. |
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 Students work on their ThinkQuest '97 Web project in the writing lab. |
lthough it
seemed from the beginning that sound academic
principles were being addressed, and it was quite clear that students and
teachers were enthusiastic, it was still possible that these benefits were
stemming from the "novelty effect" sometimes seen when new technology
is employed. Would enthusiasm wane as the technology became more familiar
and commonplace? It would appear not. Over six years later, in the 1996-97 school year, this project is even stronger. Students are writing stacks in almost every subject area, and have won state-level awards for their work in biology, government, English grammar, chemistry, Spanish, American literature, and British literature. Students and teachers have presented at state conventions, and the high school now has an elective class available for those who want to become even more adept at using multimedia authoring software. |
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he recent
addition of a direct connect to the Internet
has also added a new dimension to the project. In addition to providing
an abundance of resources, the World Wide Web has made it possible for
students (and teachers) to post their stacks on the school Website, funded by a TENET
(Texas Education Network) mini-grant I received in 1995. Using
HTML, students are also beginning to write
web pages that incorporate many of the same elements as their stacks. For
instance, a group of 18 students recently collaborated on a "Tour
of the Historical Corridor" project, taking field trips, interviewing
local experts, and gathering information from local libraries and museums.
The excitement level was high when they found out they had won fifth place
in the world in the Cyberfair '96 contest, and they are anxious to begin
another project. The Writing Lab program has grown, too, from its start in 1989 with 13 Macintosh Plus computers to a 25-station lab with a scanner, laserwriter, lcd panel, and other peripherals. Although the first HyperCard projects were written when the entire school had only one Macintosh Plus without a hard drive, the addition of computers to the lab, library, and classrooms has helped to increase both the scope of the program and the sophistication level of the students' work. |
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nd Jennifer?
Some of her stacks are still posted on
the Karnes City High School Web site, although
she has long since graduated from college. Unlike an old term paper or
book report, her creative work has not been relegated to a box in the attic,
and others can still enjoy learning from it just as she enjoyed creating
it.
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