Lesson Plan 4: Reaching Out. Managing responses, expanding the audience

Instructional Objectives

• To empower students by making them aware of their influence they have on the Internet audience
• To manage school and community responses to the web site
• To expand the audience by offering new types of information and services

Time required

Continuous. One or two periods a week until the end of the semester.

Advance Preparation

Already students started to work with the audience. They became conscious of the existence of a larger and more unpredictable public that they have originally envisioned.

Materials Required

Computer lab.

Vocabulary

Discussion forums, bulletin board, traffic, hits, visitor counter, email listserv, CGI forms, search engines, metasearches,

Procedures

Individual and group work.

Activities

The instructor probably needs two or three periods to instruct students on the acceptable norms or behavior and school policies on contacting persons on line. The teacher will check every new contact. No personal information will be exchanged. Students will then work independently and in groups in performing their tasks of expanding the school web site and reaching to new audiences. Such activities include registering the web site with popular searches, contacting other school web site coordinators and proposing common Internet-based activities that are instructional, and sending information about school and its web site to educational agencies and non-profit organizations that can act as sponsors for many activities. 

Each group of students will manage a different type of feedback from the readers: a group will deal with responses from alumni, another group will manage feedback from present students. Students will also categorize feedbacks that requires immediate response and separate them from other types of comments..

To see examples of responses received in our mailbox, go to: http://teachersnetwork.org/teachnet-lab/fklane/feedback.htm

Extensions or Follow-up

The web teams may find funding sources among non-profit groups and alumni associations. The students may draft Requests for Proposal and submit them to the teacher for consideration.

Homework

Students will check information contained in the visitor’s corner, submission forms, emails, and discussion forums. They will prepare answers to the issues presented.

Evaluation

• Traffic to the web site, as measured by individual hits
• Number of feedback forms from visitors and the quality of their comments
• The quality of web team’s response to concerns from the audience. Quality will be measured by feedback forms and by a self-devised quality checklist, that will include proper written communication.
• The number of organizations, including other schools that are interested in educational partnerships with our school.

  Examples of checklists and evaluations:

• Kathy Schrock

• Sheila Gersch

• http://fklane.org/criteria.htm