Teaching with the Internet


Siva Kumari

Rice University
E-mail: skumari@rice.edu
URL: http://cttl.rice.edu/owlink

The WWW is being increasingly used by teachers as a tool in educating students in the classrooms in Houston and the South Texas area. Teachers who have been trained to use the web and create materials for students have varied educational strategies that they deploy in creating online lesson plans and in thinking about online lesson plans. This paper will discuss some of the lesson plans that teachers in two distinctly different projects have created to integrate the web into the teaching and learning that occurs in Internet connected classrooms connected. The paper will give a brief description of the projects themselves and the teacher training strategies models that led to the creation of lesson plans. The discussion will then focus on the online lessons that the teachers created. The teaching styles that are best adapted to teaching with the Internet. The lessons will be analyzed to discover the learning strategies that are targeted and the teaching strategies that are best suited to them.

The two projects described will include:

Project OWLink: Twenty teachers in five diverse Texas area public schools are connected to the Internet and to each other via an ATM based interactive distance learning network. Teachers have created online curriculum that includes net-based activities that supplement the distance education sessions. Online lesson plans employ highly creative strategies that use the web as an information resource, an interactive data gathering tool and as an environment to demonstrate concepts. The web is also used as a collaborative environment for creating curriculum and creating projects online.

GirlTECH project: An NSF funded project trained 20 math and science teachers on how to integrate the Internet into their daily classroom activities. Teachers created lessons which focus on one-computer classroom activities or activities that require less connectivity. Some educational strategies used were to use traditionally non-educational materials on the web in creating online activities that require students to develop strategies to gather, analyze and process information.

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Hope.Greenberg@uvm.edu Last update: 22 August 1996