Instructional Objectives

Lesson Plan 3: Publishing

Instructional Objectives

To publish an integrated and functional web page entirely created by students
To offer students a real incentive in perfecting their writing. This incentive is reaching a wide audience with the help of the Internet.
To teach students how to write effectively by understanding the audience they are writing for.
To establish continuity in managing and expanding the web page.
To expand the purpose of peer review groups.

Time required

3-4 weeks. At least 15 instructional periods.

Advance Preparation

During the previous activity (see Lesson Plan Two), students published their drafts on the Internet. They peer reviewed their performance and established guidelines for future activities.

Materials Required

Paper and pen, computer room, digital camera, video camera, and scanner.

Vocabulary

Journalistic words: layout, interview, cover story, heading, research, sources, web team.

Computer concepts: web publishing, video and audio streaming, scanning, uploading, and downloading.

Procedures

Group work. Student-based assessment. The teacher is a facilitator and only occasionally a supervisor of each group’s activities.

Activities

Week One. The students will consolidate and expand their group activities. The web teams will create action plans and establish daily and weekly objectives. There should be teams covering student activities, school administration, teams, clubs, after school programs, opinion polls, departments, teachers, and alumni. Students will collect information, write essays and reports and integrate them at team level. Each web team will have a “lab web page”, where they can publish directly on the server and experiment with layout, pictures, and text. Critical thinking exercised through the peer review model is strongly encouraged. Examples of coverage of after school activities: http://fklane.org/LLP.htm and http://fklane.org/saturday.htm

Week Two. Students will start using the camera and video camera to take pictures and short movies of school activities. One student from each group will receive additional training in audio and video editing (The students will be asked to stay after class for more training). These students will be able to record and process pictures and movie clips and create multimedia files that will accompany the featured article or coverage. All these technological activities are done in conjunction with writing and reading.

Week Three. Students will be able to integrate multimedia formats (audio, video, and image) with high quality content. Audio and video files will be uploaded on the school web site. Now the web page should look unified, consistent, and interconnected. Students will now explore other ways to reach the school audience. They will also measure the impact the school web site has on students.

Extensions or Follow-up

Students may explore new ways of bringing content on the Internet. The animated pictures and Flash software are two examples. The students interested more in these procedures will experiment with these multimedia programs and will bring them up on the web site.

Homework

Each web team will distribute homework assignments to its members. The team is responsible for the full implementation of the plan that was agreed upon by its members.

Evaluation

There will be at least three evaluation components:

The web team evaluation. Work done by a member or group will be evaluated at team level, using the peer review process.
The class evaluation. The web team product, once uploaded (published on the web), will be peer reviewed by the class, according to guidelines and rubrics devised by students. Comments will be integrated in future products. See what students think about the school web site at: http://teachersnetwork.org/teachnet-lab/fklane/studentevaluations.htm
The public evaluation. Students will actively seek confirmation from students and other people viewing their web page. They will collect feedback information, organize it, and include it in their review plans.

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