Team:
Denise Williford
Brandon Beltz
Edna Monroe
TEAM INSTRUCTIONAL WEB PROJECT
OVERVIEW
We, in the educational community, are dedicated to the discovery of innovative approaches that will engage all students in critical thinking and knowledge construction. The use of multimedia in instruction represents an effective and efficient way to integrate computers into school curriculums, thereby creating an environment in which students can learn with technology. The primary purpose of our website is to facilitate students’ conception of the scientific method through the use of visualization tools (i.e., streamed audio/video and digital images). The focus of this Overview will be to communicate the decisions made by our team during the creation of our website, and connect those decisions to what we’ve learned this term.
During the planning stage of this project, our team considered factors that would influence the design of our website. According to Abbey, “on-line instruction should be guided by the following factors: theoretical orientation, learning goals, content, learner characteristics, and technological capabilities” (p. 161). However, since time is limited for completion of this assignment, our focus will center on establishing learning goals, content, and the technological capabilities of our website only.
We believe that the most important consideration we faced when designing an educational website is aligning learning goals with state curriculum requirements. According to the Philadelphia School District Curriculum Frameworks – Science Standard #1: Nature of Science, our learning goal is to help students better understand the nature of science through observing, thinking, experimenting, and validating. For this reason, we have decided to design a website that focuses on having students visualize the scientific method.
We further decided that our website should provide supplemental content information for the learner to be utilized in conjunction with traditional instruction. This, according to Harmon and Jones, is considered a Level 2 - Supplemental site (Abbey, p. 135). We’ve also built-in easy-to-navigate web pages through the use of a series of hyperlinks. In addition to textual content information, we choose to include lesson ideas, worksheets, an experiment, definitions, a matching vocabulary game, and links to other relevant sites. At this time, the first iteration of the site only includes an experiment, definitions, and an idea for a worksheet.
Because students sometimes have difficulty seeing certain scientific ideas in traditional text media (i.e., textbooks), our site’s technological capabilities include the use of computer visualization tools in the form of engaging and colorful graphics, concept maps, video, and digital images. Visualization tools offer the visual learner an additional option for understanding. Our website offers students the opportunity of taking a step-by-step visual tour through the scientific method. We agree with Jonassen’s assertion that visualization enables learners to manifest visual ideas more easily and accurately. Further, Snir (1995) maintains that visualization will clarify and correct commonly held misconceptions of phenomena by visualizing these ideas (p. 195).
Our aim when designing this site was to offer students an appealing on-line learning environment that would support what they’re being taught in their classrooms. We hope that we’ve accomplished our goal.