Seek and yee shall find has been my motto.  Alas and alack, what I find is not always appropriate for middle school students.  Often the material is written on a college level or above and is quite frustrating to less literate students.  Other pages are slanted, out-dated, or worse: misinformative.  Two prescriptive devices I will take away from this course are Web page evaluations and  age friendly search engines.  Although I made our school aware of Searchopolis last year, I was surprised at how many  other options are out there that locate different resources.  Most find age appropriate materials. Kudos to the librarians who are taking charge of the educational web. The most viable  Internet material for middle school students I have found comes from library resource pages.(KidsClick: A Web Search Tool for Kids by Librarians).   The librarians help to separate the good from the bad.  I have always used my good judgement when evaluatinb websites, but I never looked at them systematically. The evaluation tools I am now equipped with help me to ascertain which web pages are appropriate.  I expect the students to become great evaluators as I  work with them this year.

          The listservs I have joined have already answered many questions that I didn't even know I had.  Being at a charter school that is not part of a district has been rough.  The school district that I have my teacher connections with does not like the  competition from my charter school.  I feel uncomfortable calling educators I know and asking them questions.  The listservs take these inhibitions away.  The worse that can happen is that no one answers a question I pose.  That isn't a major problem because I have found other listserv groups I can call upon.  Although we have a listserv at Sussex Academy, most of the teachers do not log on.   The other teachers are also reluctant to open any form of chat lines with parents because they fear being barraged with a time consuming monster.  Not that they are isolationists, but they are hard workers who suffer from the greatest of teacher needs---time.  I have thought of another listserv function that I can establish. There is the fact that we are a charter school and have one innate problem.  There is no local community of parents who meet at the same ball park. We have students coming from every corner of Sussex County.  Some families live over an hour away from each other.  The best thing I can offer the parents is a listserv.  I believe that although I will monitor it, that I will keep it a parents only group.  That way they can feel free to express their concerns as they do at the ballpark in my neighborhood.  As for setting one up for the students, they use Instant Messenger regularly, and in middle school it isn't always a kind form of communication.  I will open a discussion with the students this fall and determine if they would use a listserv that is open to all and monitored by teachers.  They may be satisfied with IM.  I will seek and recommend educational listservs beyond the school, and perhaps have them compare and contrast them with "chat rooms".   To motivate them to join I hope to offer ice cream or some such reward to the homeroom that has the largest number of parents join the listserv. There is nothing like a little progeny pressure to motivate parents.

              This past year I worked with the 7/8th grade team and completed four integrated units; one for each discipline. This project was between a level three and level four project on the LoTi Framework.   The collaboration took place when I taught PowerPoint because the content of the PowerPoint presentation is superfluous to the tools and presentation techniques I was teaching.  Three major difficulties arose.  One difficulty was with the core teachers who saw the integrated lesson as superfluous to their lessons.  The second was timing. It was difficult coordinating the time at which my students were advanced enough to learn PowerPoint and the appropriate timing of the lessons for the teachers.  The third was technical.  Coordinating a time and location for the other students to see my students presentations was almost impossible. 
     Despite these difficulties their were some major successes.  Students were able to use PowerPoint in oral presentations in a jigsaw fashion while the students who were not in my class presented using other means.  The math classes integrated many of the on-line tools and data sets into their PP, but did not get to share them since they were the last quarter.  From what I learned in this class, integrating on the Internet may solve most of these problems.  I can establish a unit roughly based on the core curriculum.  I can teach them both how to use the internet wisely as well as make them aware of the resources out there. When it comes time to access it, they can access their Web pages outside of my classroom rather easily. 
     As a formerGirl Scout leader, I plan to call on my background as a trailblazer and teach the students how to forge their own pathways on the Internet.  I will equip them with the basic tools they need to navigate and a knowledge that others will follow their trails.   Their responsibility will be to make the way easier for others.  To this end I intend to have the students create their own student help pages on the web and link them to a home page.  This way the students and teachers can access what other students have discovered about the internet regardless of what session they get to me.  I won't have to rely on teachers who don't want to work with me.  By providing a technology foundation and keeping the students organized, I can get the students off and running to help themselves.(Rogers,Andres,Jacks, and Clauset,1990) 
     Last year I fought to be allowed to include touch typing into my curriculum.  By December the teachers could see which students passed through my doors and lamented that the others where slowing the class down by hunting and pecking.  They couldn't wait for the others to get to computer class.  I hope the student help pages have the same effect.  The students will enter things such as search engines they have found, data tools, useful links and more.  I can create my own web searches based on the core curriculum.  By posting this on the web, the teachers, students, and parents can access them at anytime.  It will not be necessary to have group gatherings to present the students work.  They can access it as needed and add to it as they wish.  Like the touch typing, I hope the teachers will catch on, as I have, that the Internet is great tool to have on their side--in more ways than one!
     I walk away from this class armed with technology resources I will share with colleagues.  With the help of Judi Harris' Network Collection and instructions on planning internet projects(Global Schoolhouse), my mind is spinning on creating telecollaboration projects.  I have in mind having the students create a Delaware watershed field trip and setting up an teleconference with the genetics department at the University of Delaware.  These are only the ideas I have for the science department! As the technology teacher I must first and foremost teach them about technology, how to use technology, and that there are ethics involved in using technology.  (Levin, Rogers, Waugh, & Smith,1989) Curriculum integration is wonderful for those projects in which subject matter is superfluous to learning the project. For my students, educational integration should act as an authentic means of studying technology and the technological objectives must not get lost in the process.   EDUC 632 has provided me with a plethora of resources to meet this end.
 
 

References and Resources

:

Global School Net Foundation. (1999). Harnessing the Web.[Online].Available:
 http://gsh.lightspan.com/web/[2001,July 11].

Harris, J.(1995)Organizing and Facilitating Telecollaborative Projects[Online].Available: 
http://gsh.lightspan.com/weblib/harris/February.htm#activity[2001,July 17].

Moersch , C. (1999). Levels of Technology Implementation: A Framework for Measuring Classroom Technology Use. Learning and Leading with Technology.[Online].Available:
http://www.udel.edu/sine/course/syllabus01/readings/loti_article.pdf[2001,July 20].

Rogers,Andres,Jacks,Clauset(1990).Telecommunications In The Classroom:Keys to Successful Telecomputing.[Online].Available:
http://lrs.ed.uiuc.edu/guidelines/RAJC.html[2001,July 17].

Strommen, Erik F. and Lincoln, Bruce.(1992). Constructivism, Technology, and the Future of Classroom Learning. [Online].Available:http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/k12/livetext/docs/construct.html[2001,July 15].